Kinds of Kindness (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2024)

Margaret Qualley, Jesse Plemons, and Willem Dafoe in Kinds of Kindness

Cast: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Joe Alwyn, Hong Chau, Mamadou Athie, Yorgos Stefanos, Hunter Schafer. Screenplay: Yorgos Lanthimos, Efthimis Filippou. Cinematography: Robbie Ryan. Production design: Anthony Gasparro. Film editing: Yorgos Mavropsaridis. Music: Jerskin Fendrix.  

Fighting Vainly the Old Ennui

Movie: La Piscine (Jacques Deray, 1989) (Criterion Channel).

Book: William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, ed. Kenneth Palmer. 

TV: Buddy vs. Duff, Holiday: Winter Wonderland (Food Network); The Rachel Maddow Show (MSNBC); Maid: Bear Hunt.

Jean-Paul (Alain Delon) and Marianne (Romy Schneider) are types familiar to viewers of French films: lovers with too much time on their hands and not enough to occupy them. He's a failed novelist who has tried to get his life back on track by giving up alcohol and going to work for an advertising agency, and the two of them have been together for two years -- or two and a half, as he insists, perhaps a little touchily, when they're asked. Now they're on vacation in a villa on the Riviera, where they don't seem to do much but lounge around the titular swimming pool, make love, and occasionally quarrel a bit. But then they're visited by Harry (Maurice Ronet) and his 18-year-old daughter, Pénélope (Jane Birkin). Harry was a kind of mentor to the younger Jean-Paul and he was also Marianne's lover for a while. in this leisurely sun-drenched paradise they don't have much to do other than pick at one another. Pénélope is the image of boredom as she slinks around the pool, never going in. When she picks up a book, it's a mystery novel she's read before. (Jean-Paul tells her who did it. She replies, "I know.") The sexual tension relieves itself with Harry and Marianne reigniting their relationship and Jean-Paul hooking up with Pénélope, a state of things that eventuates in murder. But the murder is backgrounded to the exploration of the principal characters in a kind of morality tale about the dangers of dolce far niente. A less skillful director than Jacques Deray or a screenwriter other than Jean-Claude Carrière might have begun with the murder and based the plot on discovering the killer, but La Piscine is more about why this particular killing took place -- what led Jean-Paul to drown Harry in the pool. The bit of detective work that's shown almost outs him, but the complexity of motivation is up for the viewer to piece together. The film ends with Jean-Paul and Marianne ambiguously together. 

It has to be said that a lot of the film's effect has to do with its stars and their own pasts: Delon and Schneider had been lovers, the delight of the French gossip press, some time before they reunited for this film. Birkin had come to prominence as a model in the Carnaby Street era of Swinging London. And Ronet was known for his performances as haunted men in Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows (1958) and The Fire Within (1963), not to mention the previous film in which he was offed by Delon, Purple Noon (René Clément). 

Alain Delon and Romy Schneider in La Piscine (Jacques Deray, 1969)

Then I turned from a tale of the bored and the beautiful to the further tribulations of Alex (Margaret Qualley) in Maid, a story which still treads lightly above the pit of soap opera. Things look up for a bit in Bear Hunt as Mama (Andie MacDowell), gets committed to a mental facility. But she has made a disastrous choice by sleeping with her ex, Sean (Nick Robinson), which angers the kindly but also horny Nate (Raymond Ablack), who essentially forces her to move out of his house. And then she not only loses her job with the maid service but also the car that Nate had loaned her when Sean, who has fallen off the wagon, returns it to Nate in a jealous snit. Meanwhile, she's offered a scholarship in the creative writing program at the University of Montana, but Sean protests about her leaving the state with Matty. Moreover, Mama is sprung from the hospital by her ne'er-do-well husband, Basil (Toby Levins). If all of this weren't so sensitively told and finely acted, it might have been called The Agonies of Alex instead of Maid. 

Miss Me?

 So on Christmas Eve last year, I gave up movie blogging. A lot of effort for not much return, it seemed to me at the time. But with Christmas looming again, it feels right to re-enter the blogosphere, maybe this time with a wider scope. 

Last night, I watched Death at a Funeral (Frank Oz, 2007), a sometimes amusing, sometimes stupid British farce with some performers I like, namely Matthew Macfadyen, Peter Dinklage, and Rupert Graves. It was remade in 2011, and that version lies somewhere in the queue of movies on my DVR that I've recorded. Dinklage apparently plays the same role -- a gay man who crashes the funeral of his lover after being cut out of the man's will -- in the remake. On the whole, not a total waste of his and the other actors' talents, but not a movie I'd urge upon anyone who hasn't seen the classic Brit farces like Kind Hearts and Coronets or The Lavender Hill Mob or The Ladykillers, all of which do this sort of comic larceny and mayhem with greater finesse.

Matthew Macfadyen and Peter Dinklage in Death at a Funeral

On TV I started the second season of The Witcher, a well-made Netflix fantasy series starring Henry Cavill as some kind of fantasyland soldier of fortune dedicated to killing monsters. The first episode of the season opened with highlights supposedly recapping the first season, which started two years ago. I watched that season and enjoyed it, but I have to admit that the recap didn't really refresh me on what happened then, much of which I've forgotten. No matter, the new season started off very well on its own, and I didn't really need to be au fait with the backstory to enjoy it. 

I also watched the sixth episode of Maid, an often depressing Netflix series about the struggle of a young woman, played well by Margaret Qualley, to make it on her own with her 3-year-old daughter after leaving her emotionally abusive alcoholic husband. The series focuses on the complications and contradictions of the American welfare system, as the heroine, Alex, tries to keep her head above water despite the snares of its red tape. Andie MacDowell is wonderful as Alex's air-headed, gray-haired hippie mother, who hinders more than she helps. The series often seems to be on the verge of sinking into sentimental mush, but it hasn't done that yet. 

I'm also reading Anthony Trollope's The Warden, which takes me back to my days as a Victorian literature scholar. More on that later, maybe.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019)

Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Emile Hirsch, Margaret Qualley, Timothy Olyphant, Julia Butters, Austin Butler, Dakota Fanning, Bruce Dern, Mike Moh, Luke Perry, Damian Lewis, Al Pacino, Nicholas Hammond, Samantha Robinson, Rafal Zawierucha, Lorenza Izzo, Costa Ronin, Kurt Russell. Screenplay: Quentin Tarantino. Cinematography: Robert Richardson. Production design: Barbara Ling. Film editing: Fred Raskin.

With Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino proves himself to be perhaps the most superficial of our major filmmakers. I mean that as a compliment, recalling Oscar Wilde's remark, "All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril." Tarantino exerts a lot of effort getting things right so he can get them wrong. He meticulously re-creates the Hollywood of the late 1960s just so he can change history. And so, Sharon Tate is not murdered by the Manson family. Instead, Tex and Squeaky and Sadie are done in by the fictional Cliff Booth, Francesca Capucci, and Rick Dalton, the last incinerating Squeaky with a flamethrower -- perhaps the only "Chekhov's flamethrower" in the history of movies, its existence and Dalton's prowess with it having been established earlier in the film. Tarantino did this kind of rewriting history before, in Inglourious Basterds (2009), but without the kind of luxuriating in upending our knowledge of things the way he does here. Like almost all of his other films, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a revenge fantasy, though here the revenge is the audience's: We get our gratification from revenge upon actuality, from seeing Sharon Tate spared a horrible death. But despite the violent outcome, this is also one of Tarantino's least violent films as well as one of his least flamboyant (perhaps owing to the absence of his signature actor, Samuel L. Jackson). It comes off eventually as a kind of homage to one of the film and TV industry's least honored periods: that late-'60s era, before the emergence of film brats like Coppola and Spielberg and Scorsese gave a new direction to movies, a macho time filled with spaghetti Westerns, James Bond ripoffs like the "Matt Helm" series, and private eye shows like "Mannix," when fading stars like Rick Dalton were scrounging for whatever work they could land. Tarantino himself was a small child then, so his re-creation of the period is, like most of his oeuvre, drawn more from movies than from memory. Still, he knows how to create characters and write dialogue, and how to cast actors who can play and speak both. It won a well-deserved supporting actor Oscar for Brad Pitt, whose role seems to me at least as large as that of Leonardo DiCaprio, who was nominated as best actor but didn't win.