Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 09/14/19

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Saturday, September 14, 2019

Cold Water (Olivier Assayas, 1994)

Cyprien Fouquet and Virginie Ledoyen in Cold Water

Cast: Virginie Ledoyen, Cyprien Fouquet, László Szabó, Jean-Pierre Darrousin, Dominique Faysse, Smaïl Mekki, Jackie Berroyer, Jean-Christophe Bouvet. Screenplay: Olivier Assayas. Cinematography: Denis Lenoir. Production design: Gilbert Gagneux. Film editing: Luc Barnier.

Olivier Assayas's semi-autobiographical film is set in the 1970s and follows two teenagers, Gilles (Cyprien Fouquet) and Christine (Virginie Ledoyen), as they split from their messed-up families and set out to join a commune. They filch things from stores, experiment with drugs, and attend a wild party with other teenagers in an abandoned house that they eventually set fire to. It's a flashback to the rebellious youth movies of the 1960s and '70s, but given freshness by the performances and by the contemporary awareness of how sourly the freewheeling era of sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll ended.