Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 03/01/25

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, March 1, 2025

The Apple of My Eye (Axelle Ropert, 2016)

Bastien Bouillon and Mélanie Bernier in The Apple of My Eye

Cast: Mélanie Bernier, Bastien Bouillon, Antonin Fresson, Chloé Astor, Swann Arlaud, Lauren Mothe, Thierry Gibault, Camille Cayol, Serge Bozon, Jean-Charles Clichet. Screenplay: Axelle Ropert. Cinematography: Sébastien Buchmann. Production design: Sophie Reynaud. Film editing: François Quiqueré. Music: Benjamin Esdraffo.

Featherweight French romantic comedy in which a Greek musician (Bastien Bouillon) falls for a pretty blind woman (Mélanie Bernier) after first insulting her. Captivated, he pretends to be blind himself to win her over. The usual rom-com reversal and resolution follows. A subplot about the attempt of the musician and his brother (Antonin Fresson) to find work in Paris and a parallel storyline about the brother's romance with the blind woman's cocaine-addicted sister (Chloé Astor) feel like padding to get the film to feature length.

Nightbitch (Marielle Heller, 2024)

Amy Adams in Nightbitch

Cast: Amy Adams, Scoot McNairy, Arleigh Snowden, Emmett Snowden, Jessica Harper, Zoë Chao, Mary Holland, Archana Rajan. Screenplay: Marielle Heller, based on a novel by Rachel Yoder. Cinematography: Brandon Trost. Production design: Karen Murphy. Film editing: Ann McCabe. Music: Nate Heller.

Once upon a time, there was a woman so exhausted by the demands of motherhood that she turned into a dog. That's pretty much the premise of Nightbitch, a somewhat muddled movie that gets what coherence it has from Amy Adams's performance as the unnamed character called Mother in the credits. (Similarly, Scoot McNairy's character is known only as Husband and their 2-year-old child -- played by the precocious twins Arleigh and Emmett Snowden -- as Son.) Sometimes the transformation is literal, as in a body horror moment in which Mother discovers she is growing a tail, but mostly, as they say, it's all in her head. This fable breaks no new ground for treatments of the very real difficulties in maintaining one's sanity while raising a child, and it slops into a lame resolution at the end, satire slumping into movie convention.