1900 (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1976)

1900 (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1976)

Cast: Robert De Niro, Gérard Depardieu, Donald Sutherland, Dominique Sanda, Laura Betti, Burt Lancaster, Sterling Hayden, Stefania Sandrelli, Alida Valli, Romolo Valli, Paolo Pavesi, Roberto Maccanti. Screenplay: Franco Arcalli, Giuseppe Bertolucci, Bernardo Bertolucci. Cinematography: Vittorio Storaro. Production design: Maria Paola Maino, Gianni Quaranta. Film editing: Franco Arcalli. Music: Ennio Morricone.

In his attempt at an epic, Bernardo Bertolucci gives us many new and arresting things, but none perhaps more startling -- and ultimately more fatal to the film -- than Robert De Niro playing a passive weakling. The actor known for such aggressors as young Vito Corleone, for Travis Bickle, Jake LaMotta, even Rupert Pupkin, seems crucially miscast as the padrone of an Italian estate who can't bring himself to take sides in the conflict between communists and fascists. The De Niro smirk is still there, but it doesn't seem to fit on the face of Alfredo Berlinghieri, who waffles even when his best friend, his boyhood companion Olmo Dalcò (Gérard Depardieu), is threatened by the fascist overseer Attila Mellanchini, played -- not to say overplayed -- by Donald Sutherland. Bertolucci crafts a relationship between Alfredo and Olmo that goes beyond bromance and somehow persists for a lifetime. They are nominally twins, born on the same day in 1901 as the legitimate son of the landowner and the bastard of a peasant on his estate. The film begins with the end of World War II and the routing of the fascists, then flashes back to their birth and boyhood, skips ahead to the end of World War I, the rise and fall of fascism, and concludes with a coda in which the elderly Alfredo and Olmo are still roughhousing. It's meant to be a capsule version of the 20th century -- the original Italian title, Novecento, means "nineteen hundreds." The film is never unwatchable, but its epic ambitions are undone, I think, by Bertolucci's instinct for melodrama at the expense of characterization. The villains, Attila and his companion Regina (Laura Betti), go so far over the top in their evil-doing -- Attila casually kills a small boy with the same coolness with which he slaughters a cat earlier in the film -- that they become almost comic. It's a striking turn in the wrong direction for the director who earlier gave us a subtly intricate look at the character of a fascist with Jean-Louis Trintignant's performance in The Conformist (1970). There are colorful cameos by Burt Lancaster and Sterling Hayden to be savored, and Vittorio Storaro's cinematography and Ennio Morricone's score help the film immeasurably, but the main impression left by 1900 is of a director who overreached himself. 

Let the Sunshine In (Claire Denis, 2017)

Juliette Binoche and Xavier Beauvois in Let the Sunshine In

Isabelle: Juliette Binoche
Vincent: Xavier Beauvois
The Actor: Nicolas Duvauchelle
François: Laurent Gréville
Marc: Alex Descas
Fabrice: Bruno Podalydès
Sylvain: Paul Blain
Denis: Gérard Depardieu
Mathieu: Philippe Katerine
Maxime: Josiane Balasko
Ariane: Sandrine Dumas

Director: Claire Denis
Screenplay: Christine Angot, Claire Denis
Based on a book by Roland Barthes
Cinematography: Agnès Godard
Production design: Arnaud de Moleron
Film editing: Guy Lecorne
Music: Stuart Staples

I'm not familiar with the films of Claire Denis, and to judge from the somewhat mixed reviews of Let the Sunshine In, I may have picked the wrong one to start with. It is certainly talky, in that peculiarly French way of batting ideas back and forth like tennis balls, without anyone ever scoring. It's hard for someone coming into it cold to figure out what it is: a psychological drama, a comedy, a treatise on love and sex? And it was only at the end, when Gérard Depardieu imposes his corporosity on the film, playing a kind of upscale guru/fortune teller who wags a pendant over the photographs of Isabelle's lovers and delivers "predictions" that have all the soothing ambiguity of a newspaper horoscope column, that I decided: It's a satire. Specifically, one directed at everyone's confusion about relationships. That realization almost made me want to go back and watch it again to confirm my revelation, but I'm not sure I can subject myself so soon again to all that talk. What makes the film work as well as many think it does is the performance of the always-wonderful Juliette Binoche as Isabelle, a woman with several lovers ... no, strike that, I mean sexual partners. The first one we see right away, the banker named Vincent, having sex with Isabelle. But there's no postcoital glow: Immediately, Vincent reveals himself as an absolute jerk, which is reinforced by a subsequent scene in a bar where Vincent pointlessly torments an innocent bartender, ordering him to place the bottle here, the glass there, and asking him if they have any "gluten-free olives." Next, there's an unnamed actor, with whom Isabelle definitely has chemistry, but who reveals himself to be as self-conscious about relationships as she is. And so on. The upshot is that Isabelle and her partners are guilty of what D.H. Lawrence denounced as "sex in the head." But the trouble with the film seems to me that it has no narrative shape: Isabelle is as confused at the end as she is at the beginning, so there's no arc to follow though the film. Her life is a series of crises that may feel achingly familiar to many viewers, but aside from some wonderful moments -- as when Isabelle mocks a group of her fellow artists, gathered for a symposium in the country, for their pretentious admiration of nature -- I felt emptier at the end of Let the Sunshine In than at the beginning.

The Woman Next Door (François Truffaut, 1981)

Gérard Depardieu and Fanny Ardant in The Woman Next Door

Bernard Coudray: Gérard Depardieu
Matilde Bauchard: Fanny Ardant
Philippe Bauchard: Henri Garcin
Arlette Coudray: Michèle Baumgartner
Odile Jouve: Véronique Silver

Director: François Truffaut
Screenplay: François Truffaut, Suzanne Schiffman, Jean Aurel
Cinematography: William Lubtchansky
Music: Georges Delerue

François Truffaut's penultimate film skims along the surface of romantic melodrama (not to say soap opera) without ever really picking up any of that genre's essential energy the way filmmakers like Douglas Sirk or his great European admirer Rainer Werner Fassbinder were able to do. It's a film full of Truffaut touches, such as having the story introduced by a secondary character, Mme. Jouve, an older woman who has her own history of distastrously blighted love. Mme. Jouve even orders the camera about as she sets up the narrative. There are also some intriguing details about the characters that seem to have symbolic potential. For example, both husbands, Bernard and Philippe, have managerial jobs that involve transportation: Philippe is an air traffic controller, and Bernard trains the captains of supertankers, working in a large outdoor scale model of a harbor for tankers -- a job that superficially resembles the one Antoine Doinel held in Truffaut's Bed and Board (1970), except that Bernard takes it much more seriously than Antoine did. Unfortunately, there's not much story here: Bernard and Matilde had been lovers, and after their separation each married someone else. Now Matilde and Philippe have moved in next door to Bernard and Arlette, and the old love affair resumes, with painful results. It's only the finesse in the direction and acting, and the attention to secondary details like the ones just cited, that give The Woman Next Door resonance and depth -- though perhaps not enough.

Watched on Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Danton (Andrzej Wajda, 1983)

Gérard Depardieu in Danton

Danton: Gérard Depardieu
Robespierre: Wojciech Psoniak
Éléonore Duplay: Anne Alvaro
Camille Desmoulins: Patrice Chéreau
Louis de Saint-Just: Bogusław Linda
Lucille Desmoulins: Angela Winkler

Director: Andrzej Wajda
Screenplay: Jean-Claude Carrière
Based on a play by Stanislawa Przybyszewsa
Cinematography: Igor Luther
Production design: Allan Starski
Music: Jean Prodromidès
Costume design: Yvonne Sassinot de Nesle

Watched on Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Movie costume dramas are usually moral fables, designed not so much to teach history as to illuminate current events. That's certainly the case with Andrzej Wajda's Danton, a French-Polish collaboration about the power struggle between Danton and Robespierre that put an end to the first phase of the French Revolution and paved the way for the rise of Napoleon. Wajda intentionally cast French actors as Danton and his followers and Polish actors as Robespierre and his partisans, suggesting a similarity of Robespierre's suppression of free speech and civil liberties t that of the Soviet puppet government in contemporary Poland. But the performances allow the film to override its political allusions. Gérard Depardieu looks goofy in a powdered wig, and he knows it, but he makes a fascinating Danton, clumsily trying to win Robespierre over with an elaborate dinner and attention to such trivial details as a flower arrangement -- Robespierre likes blue, he insists -- but then angrily sweeping the dishes to the floor when Robespierre proves resistant. In the end, his powerful denunciation of what Robespierre has done to France demonstrates why Danton was such a threat to his enemy. Wojciech Psoniak's Robespierre is almost overmatched by Depardieu's Danton, but he communicates not only the character's hidebound devotion to what he sees as the aims of the Revolution but also his gradually mounting disappointment at the impending doom of his ideals. The end, in which his mistress's nephew recites the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which he has dutifully memorized, is a powerfully ironic moment, emphasizing how Robespierre's direction of the Revolution has compromised and vitiated those rights. Wajda gives his film a strong forward movement, never stalling to preach at us.

Jean de Florette / Manon of the Spring (Claude Berri, 1986)

There's no good reason why Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring should have been two films rather than one. They were shot together over the course of seven months, but released separately, Manon following Jean after about three months. Shown together as one film, they would total some 230 minutes -- only a bit longer than Ben-Hur (William Wyler, 1959) at 212 minutes or Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962) at 222 minutes. But the length of those films seems consistent with their epic pretensions, whereas Jean/Manon together amount to a domestic melodrama -- an entertaining one, with a beautiful Provençal setting, but far from an epic. Their separate releases feel a bit like a con -- as in economics. Films of that blockbuster length are a drag on the exhibitor, who must schedule fewer showings per day, so it probably made sense to release Jean, which unabashedly announces at the end that it's "part one," to whet an appetite for Manon, whose posters announced it as the second part of Jean de Florette. Voilà! double the box office take. In fact, Manon of the Spring had been filmed before, by Marcel Pagnol in 1952, and it had been a long film, as much as four hours, before being cut by the distributor. Pagnol was so upset by this experience that he turned the screenplay into a novel, L'Eau des Collines, adding the story of Manon's father, Jean, which had been only a backstory in his film. And it's this novel that Claude Berri decided to adapt into his two films. The problem I see, having just watched Berri's films back to back, is that there's not quite enough material for two. Jean de Florette is an overextended prequel, introducing the characters of César Soubeyran (Yves Montand) and his nephew Ugolin (Daniel Auteuil), and their villainous attempt to cut off the water supply to Jean (Gérard Depardieu), the newcomer who inherits the estate they covet. Or perhaps Manon of the Spring is a thinly developed sequel, in which Jean's daughter, Manon (Emmanuelle Béart), avenges her father. If Jean had been trimmed of some of the scenes of Jean raising rabbits and Manon of some of the shots of Manon gamboling with her goats in the hills -- as well as the romantic subplot involving the new village schoolteacher (Hippolyte Girardot) -- both stories could have fitted nicely into one movie. Manon climaxes with a scene in which César learns an uncomfortable truth about Jean's parentage, but Berri and co-screenwriter Gérard Brach drag the film out after that revelation, which should have been left to make its impact. Still, Berri's films have much to recommend them, especially the performances of Montand, Auteuil, and Depardieu (the last is sorely missed in the second film) and the beautiful cinematography of Bruno Nuytten. Jean-Claude Petit's score makes good use of themes from the overture to Giuseppe Verdi's La Forza del Destino.  

The Last Métro (François Truffaut, 1980)

Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Gérard Depardieu, Jean Poiret, Andréa Ferréol, Paulette Dubost, Jean-Louis Richard, Maurice Risch, Sabine Haudepin, Heinz Bennent. Screenplay: François Truffaut, Suzanne Schiffman, Jean-Claude Grumberg. Cinematography: Néstor Almendros. Production design: Jean-Pierre Kohut-Svelko. Film editing: Martine Barraqué. Music: Georges Delerue.

Watching The Last Métro only a day after The Sorrow and the Pity (Marcel Ophüls, 1969) was instructive, if a little bit unfair to François Truffaut's romantic backstage drama. The two films deal with the same milieu, France during World War II, but with such differing approaches that the stark devotion to ferreting out the truth in Ophüls's film makes Truffaut's dramatization of the plight of a Jewish theater owner and his company feel more glossy and sentimental than it perhaps really is. Truffaut, who was born in 1932, was only a boy during the war, so he can't be expected to have the kind of first-hand awareness of events that the adults pictured in his film possess. Consequently, his own preoccupation, the world of actors and directors, takes precedence in the film over the suffering people endured under the Nazis. He has admitted in interviews that The Last Métro is a kind of companion film to Day for Night (1973), his behind-the-camera account of making a movie. What he does recall is the theater -- in his case the movie theater rather than the legitimate stage -- was a kind of refuge from hardship, the hunger and cold brought about by wartime rationing. People gathered in theaters for communal warmth. The story is principally about an actress, Marion Steiner (Catherine Deneuve), who is trying to keep the theater that was run before the war by her husband, Lucas (Heinz Bennent), open. Lucas, who is Jewish, is rumored to have fled to America, but in fact he is hiding in the cellar of the theater while Marion, with the help of the rest of the regular company, stages a play. The director, Jean-Loup Cottins (Jean Poiret), is working from the notes Lucas made on the play before his disappearance. Cottins has his own dangerous secret: He's gay. A new leading man, Bernard Granger (Gérard Depardieu), joins the company, and inevitably a tension develops between him and Marion. Meanwhile, Lucas has figured out ways to listen in on rehearsals and make suggestions to Marion that she passes along to Cottins, who is unaware of Lucas's hiding place. Marion also has the difficulty of dealing with the authorities, who could close the theater at any moment, especially when the influential critic Daxiat (Jean-Louis Richard), a collaborator with the Nazis, takes an interest in her and the play. What takes place on stage, namely the sexual tension between the characters played by Marion and Bernard, often mirrors what's happening backstage. The Last Métro is a well-crafted movie -- Truffaut wrote the screenplay with Suzanne Schiffman -- that was France's entry for the best foreign-film Oscar and won a raft of the French César Awards, including one for cinematographer Nestor Almendros.