GSC Films: M-R Ma Saison Préférée 1993 André Téchiné 3.0 Catherine Deneuve, Daniel Auteuil. Beautifully Photographed A
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GSC Films: M-R Ma saison préférée 1993 André Téchiné 3.0 Catherine Deneuve, Daniel Auteuil. Beautifully photographed and meditative film about family relationships, loneliness, inability to communicate and establish and maintain relationships in southwest France. Focuses on Deneuve, reserved, disciplined and attractive matron, who has unspoken, reserved relationship with her husband, is standoffish with her children, and who struggles with her neurotic relationship with her brother (Auteuil). Their mother is a widow; she is strong, independent and rather blaming, always finding fault with her children; the issue is whether they will take her into their house, or send her to a retirement home; she has a massive stroke and dies in the end. Brother and sister have deep, enduring relationship that is sometimes harmonious and loving, and often antagonistic, even violently so; there are hints of incestuous feelings, but neither allows to go further. Movie often reads like a play, but the exquisite photography of nature (rivers, countryside, beginning in winter and proceeding into spring and summer) is cinematic, as are the ambiguous events – mother having stroke in orchard with camera’s focus on cherries, mother kills her chickens before she is taken off to retirement home, Deneuve having erotic encounter – almost a rape -- with young man in park (fantasy?), Auteuil jumping off balcony, but (intentionally?) only hurting his ankle and not killing self, etc. Subplot involving younger generation (adopted Lucien is obsessed with sex, Anne plays easy Bach pieces and is as stand-offish as her parents) that seems rather aimless. Mother announces the theme as her husband wanting their two children to be “moderne;” success, one becomes a notaire and the other a medical neurologist, and yet they are alienated, unhappy, and generally unable to maintain life-giving relationships. The theme is underlined by director shooting conversations with machines roaring in the background – trucks passing on the freeways, planes passing overhead, traffic in the city streets, etc., all of them interfering with the words that mediate communication. Film opens with painting of Siamese twins – eternally connected, tied to one another; it closes with Deneuve reciting beautiful poem about the poet’s connection with a force or person as mediated through nature. Deneuve’s and Auteuil’s relationship is hardened and falsified by conditions of life in the modern world? Anti-modern film? Does it try too hard? (2006) Ma vie de courgette (My Life as a Zucchini) 2016 Claude Barras (France); writer Celine Sciamma 3.0 Touching little comedy drama about a child (nicknamed Courgette) sent to an orphanage after the death of his alcoholic mother. Stop-motion animation is a bit crude, although effective: jerky motion; minimalist sets; puppets have large round-ball faces with large expressive eyes (Keene style) that appeal opening and closing and rolling right and left, and little pucker mouths; the flattened red noses are unattractive; Courgette has distinctively blue hair. Courgette accidentally kills his mother when he slams a trap door on her; he meets the kind Raymond, the cop, and is then ferried to an orphanage, where he is at first lonely, but soon warms up to the fraternal camaraderie of the children, who support and love one another in the absence of their parents. Courgette has his ups and downs until he meets the sad, sensitive Camille, who begins to give him a sense of family; the counter movement is provided by her cruel and unpleasant mother (tight bodice), but since she is the only bad guy in the film, happiness triumphs with the support of the other children and the decision of Raymond, who becomes the foster parent of Courgette and Camille; the three will live happily ever after. The animation is distractingly primitive compared to Anglo-American stop motions such as ‘The Corpse Bride’, ‘The Nightmare before Christmas, and ‘The Fantastic Mr. Fox”, but this little film (less than an hour long) evokes genuine feelings of sympathy for children deprived of the love of family – parents and siblings – but who are able to find surrogates in the love of fellows in the orphanage and eventually of adoptive parents. Sunny atmosphere seemingly meant for children while also appealing to adults. (June 2017) Maborosi 1995 Hirokazu Kore-eda 2.0 Makiko Ezumi Very slow moving film about woman – Yumiko -- who has to learn to accept loss: she loses her grandmother when a child; her first husband commits suicide; then she has to learn to accept the loss (why did he do it when they were so happy?), and accept her new husband and stepdaughter in a very provincial fishing village. Movie is at times touching, especially when milking the personal loss angle. Editing is done at extremely slow pace (I 2x fast forwarded through much of the movie) and would be generally unbearable to a western 1 audience. Almost all shots are medium long or long shots with few cuts. Often camera would run on a scene with no one in it, the characters would enter, and perhaps eventually leave, with camera running whole time. Extreme attention to color balance and mise-en-scene, making each shot much like a painting or tableau vivant; not many bright tones, but mostly dark, with a fair amount of symbolism (e.g., the condition of the bicycle that Yumiko shares with her first husband). Obvious debt to Ozu, but doesn’t seem to generate as much emotion, perhaps because self-consciously arty. (2004) The Machinist 2004 Brad Anderson 3.0 Jennifer Jason Leigh as sensitive, vulnerable prostitute that would like to settle down; a scarily emaciated, mentally tortured, loner paranoid insomniac Christian Bale, who is Trevor, a lathe operator in a factory; Aitana Sanchez-Gijon as sympathetic, pretty waitress with a child who has seizures; John Sharian as big, bald-headed, smirking nightmare guy pursuing Bale. Nightmare-style thriller, psychological horror film about a haunted machine operator so miserable that he has not slept in a year (he says). He has many horror-movie-style visions that even in the beginning the viewer takes as subjective manifestations of his Angst: blood pouring out of his refrigerator, post-it notes in his kitchen providing clues to something and threatening him with death, a fellow worker (Sharian) that follows him around threateningly, a friendship with a waitress (Sanchez- Gijon) who turns out not to exist. Bale’s psychological condition and hallucinations recall Catherine Deneuve in Polanski’s ‘Repulsion’ or Gene Hackman’s toilet boiling over with blood in ‘The Conversation’. Bale’s physical appearance – 60 pounds lighter, bulging, haunted eyes, emaciated face with bones protruding, skin-and-bones chest – is very disturbing, so much so that it becomes distracting: the viewer focuses on Bale’s weight-loss feat and his sickly appearance rather than on the psychology of the film’s character and the progress of the narrative. The mystery deepens as the film progresses and is then cleared up in the final scenes: Trevor had killed a child in a hit-and-run accident occurring about a year ago (we see it happen with Bale at his normal weight); after running from the accident scene, his intense guilt led to the paranoid hallucinations; at the end of the film Bale, who now finally understands what is happening to him, turns himself in at a police station for the hit and run. The film, while effective and often gripping, is dreary and oppressive – shot in a dreary blue-gray palette with the camera lingering on Bale’s scary face, dark shadows, decaying images, etc.; not to be viewed for entertainment! The narrative and the psychological observations are effective, but the film would probably have worked better if the lead was not played by a (good-looking) star actor who has been so dramatically and scarily transformed and if the writer had focused more on narrative clarity. (2013) Machuca 2004 Andrés Wood (Chile) 4.0 Matias Quer as Gonzalo, shy and somewhat passive 11-year-old upper middle class kid from Santiago – he is the story’s point of view; Ariel Mateluna as Machuca, a kid from the wrong side of the tracks living in shanty town – he receives a scholarship to the English-language school that Gonzalo attends; Manuela Martelli as pretty , flirtatious Silvana, cousin (?) of Machuca; Ernesto Malbran as Father McEnroe, the liberal (Liberation Theology?) headmaster of St. Patrick’s school; Aline Kuppenheim as Gonzalo’s free-spirited, affectionate mother constantly hugging Gonzalo while conducting a love affair with an older man. Moving film set in Santiago, Chile in last months before the coup of 1973 based on the experiences of Wood in the Catholic school headed by Fr. Whelan, a CSC priest from Detroit, Michigan; we follow the fortunes of an upper middle class family and a poor one living in the Santiago favela; boys from both families become friends in the elite private school they attend (Machuca receives a scholarship from the “radical” priest); their friendship is tested by the social and political divisions leading up to and following the coup; the military goons take over the school and Silvana is killed by the military when they round up people in the favela; the ending has all the principals separated by events. Political tensions are painted in the background in the beginning of the film, but go center stage as film progresses, culminating in newsreel footage of the coup and then the brutal clearing of the favela by the military. Amusing scenes depict coming of age: Gonzalo’s sister is boy crazy and her boyfriend is obnoxious personally and politically; Gonzalo, Machuca, and Silvana form a kind of ‘Jules et Jim’ triangle experimenting innocently with sexuality – drinking cans of sweetened condensed milk and then kissing one another enthusiastically to suck the milk from one another’s lips.