Displaying Review 26 - 30 of 52 in total

• Shadows and Faces — for Cristo si è fermato a Eboli
  Written by lezard on 12.05.2020

  Everything starts with a look. An old man, Carlo Levi (Gian Maria Volonte, a great actor!), looks at his paintings and through them he looks at his past. On these paintings, there are faces.
  Looks and faces play a great part in this movie by Francesco Rosi .

  Flash back : it's a painter's look that Carlo casts at the landscapes he drives through, on a bus. It's a documentary maker's look that Rosi casts on this countryside and its people that we are about to discover.

  1935. Carlo, an artist and doctor from Torino is under house arrest and exiled in a remote village of Lucany, for political reasons (Italy experiences Mussolini's fascist regime).
  Everything opposes Carlo and the village people. It's a bad match : he's an intellectual from the North, they are peasants from the South. He is rational, they are pagan and superstitious. He is politically committed when they deal with nature and its plagues.

  It's a motionless journey which begins for Carlo, a fantastic and fascinating journey through a region which is all the more beautiful as nothing is easy and given there. A place where even Christ didn't dare to come. It has nothing to do with the sweet beauty of Tuscany or the postcard aspect of Naples seaside. It is a fierce, lunar countryside of a scaring beauty. It is a primitive landscape which has shaped people to its image. Even Carlo's bedroom looks like a cave, with a theatre of shadows.

  First a bit ironical, amused and condescending toward these people, he slowly becomes intrigued, admirative and fascinated by the sheer strength of what he discovers, their rituals, their songs, the way they exorcise their daily sufferings. Life there is a fight against poverty, misery, disease, war, exile. The earth itself is so dry that you often have to wait for the rain to be able to plough it.

  The mayor is not part of them. To him they are savages. For the village priest they are heathens, infidels. Both of them don't really see them. They disregard them, look « through » them, bored and uninterested. These people are neglected, forgotten and politically unrepresented. They have no voice, so to speak.
  Carlo does look at them and accepts to be looked at, scrutinized. Moreover, not only does he look at them but he represents them by making their portraits. He gives them a picture and they accept to be painted, as well as they accept to be cured by Carlo. Their diseases are their gift.
  Far from the stereotype of the typical talkative, gesticulating Italians from The South, far from the touristic documentaries, the movie teachesus to truly look at them. As Carlo who gives painting lessons to children and tells them : « You've got to look closely at everything, a twig, a piece of bread and the air itself. » A real lesson of cinema !
  When his sister visits him, she says she can't grasp the irrationality of these people. Carlo replies she first has to know and undertand them. He has lost his superior manners and his certainty has vanished. By becoming poorer he has of course become richer.
  Rosi has hired the real people from Lucany. His film focuses on what Bergman regarded as the most important and Ford the most moving : the human face.
  Take a tour of Lucany with Carlo and enjoy the ride. A great movie !

• Family Life — for Distant Voices, Still Lives
  Written by lezard on 19.11.2021

  Voices. Distant because they are far away but vividly alive. Unforgettable. Not the still lives, a play on words suggested by the title, but photos, screenshots coming back to life, from the past. Family photos, weddings, baptisms, funerals.

  Liverpool in the 40's and 50's. A family of workers, a violent father, a loving mother, friends.

  First feature-length film by Terence Davis, a great move and a great movie.
  Childhood, teen-age revisited, we have seen this dozens of times but the magic works here. Camera movements forward to get closer to regained time, a time that memory dismantled. Therefore chronology is « dismembered » too, but it's beside the point. The point is thoses faces, those warm lights inside the houses which cluster into an intimate and modest fresco.
  A nice feeling of déja-vu.
  Plus the voices that inhabit these lives which give them a rythm and makes them bearable, more than once. Songs are the « coup de maître » of the movie. These people sing, at the pub, at the church, on the train, at home, for ceremonies. These songs are their soul, their life, their strength. These songs are the books they can't write, the statues they can't sculpt., their work of art.
  It's deeply moving, deeply beautiful and sounds deeply true.

  They live, they get married, they beget children, they work, they die...and whatever happens, they sing.
  This movie is also a song in its own way.

• Time and Tides — for Lu bian ye can
  Written by lezard on 21.12.2021

  There is the pitch: A man looks for his nephew mistreated by his brother. The scene is set in a small province Chinese town.

  Then, there is the style. The long sequence shot in the middle of the movie is mindblowing. The talent, the timing it requires for shooting such a scene are incredible.

  This style takes us in a strange country where memory, people, names blend and mix to create a unique atmosphere where time moves in tides.

  If you let yourself drift in this journey you ll be mesmerized.

  This movie is an emotion, an experiment in itself.

  And if you like it you MUST watch Bi Gan's second film: "Long Day's Journey into Night" , which is even more.a successful achievement.

  Welcome Bi Gan in the club of great and unique directors/creators, such as Fellini or David Lynch.

• Killing Them Softly — for Elephant
  Written by lezard on 28.12.2021

  in the early 2000's Gus Van Sant is asked to make a movie inspired by the tragedy of Columbine, the last school-shooting which has just stunned America.
  He has already shot 9 movies and has just released « Gerry », a radical and fascinating film which can now be regarded as the first volume of a trilogy devoted to American youth.
  Gus Van Sant accepts the proposition but wonders how to shoot the movie and what form he should use.How can you report what life in an American high school really is ? How many characters are you going to focus on ? What period of time are you going to relate ?
  He then remembers « Elephant » a 39-minute movie by Alan Clarke about violence in civil war ridden Northern Ireland (a must-see!). This is going to be his source of inspiration. Indeed, he considers that, in a way, American teens are confronted to daily violence (which causes are complex) just as Northern Irish were.
  He thus chooses a radical solution : a short movie (81 mns), a dozen of characters mostly played by amateurs, a story unfolding on one day and the use of 1.37:1 ratio (square screen).
  The camera litterally follows one character after another. It drifts, sometimes in slow motion, in a mesmerizing journey. It looks like a ballet and soon we get familiar with these teens, understand their problems, their untold phobias, desires.
  The skill of Gus Van Sant is to render these moments natural whereas the filming, the style is as « artificial »as it can be.
  The different scenes are like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, a maze in which we softly move. There is also a paradox : whereas they all share the same space and activities, whereas they are together, an impression of great solitude permeates the film. There is elegance and softness too...before the shock that we know is going to come and so we feel time is suspended and these people doomed.
  Making much with very little is an art and Van Sant definitely an artist.
  A great movie !

• The Return of the Living Dead — for Laura
  Written by lezard on 06.01.2022

  Black screen. Voice from beyond the grave : « I'll always remember the day Laura died ». An epigraph which sounds like an epitaph. The story can begin.
  A modern Pygmalion, Waldo Lydecker (a famous mundane aristocratic columnist) takes under his guidance a young advertiser, Laura . He makes her his « creature » and leads her to success and fame. She meets Selby, a womanizer, a gigolo who seduces her into marrying. Before it happens, she is murdered. Inspector Mc Pherson leads the investigation.
  Laura is a movie about the power of creation and desire but also a landmark in film noir. Indeed, Peminger is one of the numerous Austrian directors exiled to Hollywood and who contributed so much to the history of cinema. Think about Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Eric Von Stroheim ! They were brought up under the double influence of German expressionism and psychoanalysis.
  Let's come back to the plot. Of course, every clue leads to Waldo , the perfect culprit. He regarded Laura as his and couldn't stand her belonging to the weak, cheap and vulgar Selby. He looks like a British aristocrat, arrogant, superior and scornful.
  Mc Pherson interrogates him first and it is through him, through his telling that we discover Laura. From an obscure desk clerk he made her famous, chose her dresses, hats, perfume, hairdo. He introduced her to important, influent people. Doing so, he fell in love with his creature. He speaks about her with an evident, but discreet passion. He is so talented that he creates her a second time with the sheer power of words and story telling. And this time, it is Mc Pherson who falls for her. The problem is that falling in love with a fictive character or with a dead woman is a delicate matter.
  Indeed Mc Pherson isn't an intellectual like Waldo. He is the American common man, not brainy but clever, physical. He doesn't want Laura for her beauty, vibrance or the pleasure of her company. He wants her as a woman, as a creature of flesh and bone to be possessed.
  He spends hours in her flat searching for clues but also looking at her portrait, reading her letters, smelling her perfume, touching her underwear. He desperately tries to « give a body » to his desire.
  When suddenly, in the middle of the night, as he has just fallen asleep, Laura reappears. Revived by his desire ?
  Anyway the investigation now takes a new direction : if Laura is alive who is the victim ? And who killed her ? And what if Laura was the killer ? An above all, who is Laura going to choose, now that she has three suitors ?
  It is a movie about the power of creation and the importance of imagination in every desire (think about Scottie and Madeleine in Vertigo for instance).
  But how can you lead an investigation when you're in love ? You arrest her just to be alone with her, you turn on a light to see the beauty of a face, you turn it off revealing your feelings.
  The roles are perfectly cast. Clifton Web is Waldo, Dana Andrews is Mc Pherson and Vincent Price Selby. Last but not least, Laura is embodied (what an appropriate word!) by the sublime Gene Tierney.
  You'll never forget the day you saw Laura !