We Won't Grow Old Together (Maurice Pialat, 1972)

Marlène Jobert and Jean Yanne in We Won't Grow Old Together

Cast: Marlène Jobert, Jean Yanne, Christine Fabréga, Patricia Pierangeli, Jacques Galland, Maurice Risch, Harry-Max, Muse Dalbray, Macha Méril. Screenplay: Maurice Pialat. Cinematography: Luciano Tovoli. Film editing: Bernard Dubois, Arlette Langmann. 

Now that all relationships between (and among) consenting adults can no longer be called "perverse," it's hard to find a word for that of Catherine (Marlène Jobert) and Jean (Jean Yanne) in Maurice Pialat's We Won't Grow Old Together. "Dysfunctional" comes to mind, although it has apparently been functioning for six years before we encounter them. "Sadomasochistic" is a little too clinical and reductive for their on-again, off-again pairing. Separately, it's easier to categorize Jean as a jerk and Catherine as a doormat, except that there's something larger and deeper about both of them. In the astonishing scene in which Catherine sits blank-faced while Jean spews out a torrent of abuse, denouncing everything about her from her looks to her family to aimlessness in life, we project our own emotions about what it would be like to undergo such a barrage of insults, only to realize that her blankness, her lack of affect, her failure to fight back, is a way of asserting her control over him. When we meet Jean's beautiful, competent, and independent wife, Françoise (Macha Méril), we realize that his urge to dominate and abuse Catherine stems from a sense of his own inadequacy. We Won't Grow Old Together, a title that admits failure from the outset, is a complex psychological portrait, perhaps too complex for the medium of film, which makes it at once fascinating and abhorrent. 

Volavérunt (Bigas Luna, 1999)

Aitana Sánchez-Guión in Volavérunt

La Maja Desnuda, by Francisco de Goya

Volavérunt, by Francisco de Goya

Cast: Aitana Sánchez-Guión, Penélope Cruz, Jordi Mollà, Jorge Perugorría, Stefania Sandrelli, Empar Ferrer, Zoe Berriatúa, Jean-Marie Juan, Olivier Achard, Fermí Reixach. Screenplay: Cuca Canals, Bigas Luna, based on a novel by Jean-Louis Benoît. Cinematography: Paco Femenia. Production design: Koldo Vallés. Film editing: Kenout Peltier. Music: Alberto García Demestres. 

Bigas Luna's Volavérunt tries to be several different things before finally settling down as perhaps the least interesting of them. It's an erotic fable, or a historical pageant, or a dramatization of an incident in the life of an artist, or a tale of political intrigue, before it finally becomes a whodunit. The title, which means "they have flown," refers perhaps most directly to one of Francisco de Goya's Caprichos, the artist's series of satirical etchings, which depicts his patron and perhaps mistress the Duchess of Alba, in flight with a group of grotesques at her feet. In the film, he shows his sketch of the scene to the duchess in response to her wish to fly. Which she might well desire, given that the duchess played by Aitana Sánchez-Guión is having an affair not only with Goya (Jorge Perugorría) but also with the Spanish prime minister Manuel de Godoy (Jordi Mollà), who is also having an affair with Queen Maria Luisa (Stefania Sandrelli). Meanwhile, Goya is painting a pair of portraits of a reclining woman, in one of which she is clothed and in the other nude. He is using as a model Godoy's mistress Pepita Tudó (Penélope Cruz), but the face in the finished portraits is not hers, leading to speculation that the model was actually the duchess. But this famous artistic mystery fades into the background of the movie when the duchess suddenly dies. Luna turns Godoy and Goya into detectives, out to solve the mystery of the duchess's death. Ultimately, the film collapses under the weight of too much historical speculation, both political and artistic, with only the colorful setting and the vivid performances of Sànchez-Guión, Cruz, and Sandrelli to make it memorable. 

Velvet Goldmine (Todd Haynes, 1998)

Jonathan Rhys Meyers in Velvet Goldmine

Cast: Ewan McGregor, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Christian Bale, Toni Collette, Eddie Izzard, Emily Woof, Michael Feast, Janet McTeer (voice). Screenplay: Todd Haynes, James Lyons. Cinematography: Maryse Alberti. Production design: Christopher Hobbs. Costume design: Sandy Powell. Film editing: James Lyons. Music: Carter Burwell, Craig Wedren.

I used to think that if Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, 1950), Smiles of a Summer Night (Ingmar Bergman, 1952), and 8 1/2 (Federico Fellini, 1963) could all be made into musicals, why couldn't someone do that to Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)? I mean, aside from the fact that the only person who sings in that movie, Susan Alexander Kane, isn't very good at it, there are lots of opportunities for musical numbers. Kane himself has a scene with some dancing girls that could be turned into a production number, and Bernstein's recollection of the girl in a white dress with a white parasol could be turned into a wistful ballad. Of course, you'd probably wind up calling the musical Rosebud!, with a theme song reprised throughout. So imagine my surprise when I discovered that Todd Haynes had already made a Kane musical called Velvet Goldmine. Actually, what Haynes does is superimpose the Kane plot on a story about a reporter (Christian Bale) searching for the truth about a glam rocker, Brian Slade, aka Maxwell Demon (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), whose fake death led to a career death. The resulting movie is a bit of a muddle, especially when Haynes adds elements drawn from Oscar Wilde to the mix, but it's probably better than Rosebud! would have been, and it might even have reached greatness if Haynes had been able to secure the cooperation (and the songs) of David Bowie, as he originally wanted. As it is, it's an intriguing picture of a moment in rock history and the continuing change in attitudes about gender identity. Ewan McGregor is particularly good as Curt Wild, a figure modeled on Iggy Pop, especially considering McGregor's retreat from edgy roles like this one and the junkie in Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996) into the Star Wars universe.    

The Magnificent Butcher (Yuen Woo-ping, 1979)

Sammo Hung in The Magnificent Butcher

Cast: Sammo Hung, Kwan Tak-hing, Yuen Biao, Wei Pai, Fan Mei-sheng, Chung Fat, Hoi Sang Lee, Fung Hak-on, JoJo Chan, Tong Ching, Chong Kam, Lam Ching-ying, Yuen Miu, Tsang Cho-lam. Screenplay: Edward Tang, Wong Jing. Cinematography: Ma Koon-wah.  Art direction: Wo Mak. Film editing: Peter Cheung. Music: Frankie Chan. 

A kung fu action comedy doesn't really need an elaborate plot, and certainly not one with the rape-murder subplot that sours Yuen Woo-ping's The Magnificent Butcher. What it needs is lots of setups for flips and feints, strikes and sweeps and rapid-fire conflict, and the rival martial arts schools of Yuen's movie set that up adequately. Mostly the movie is a showcase for Sammo Hung, the endearingly pudgy star whose agility belies his girth. I admit that I began to tire of so many choreographed confrontations, skillful as they were, and of the mugging of some of the actors, especially Fan Mei-sheng as Beggar So, but things picked up again when Hung's Butcher Wing took on Chung Fat's Wildcat, who displayed moves I haven't seen since the last time I tried to trim my cat's claws. Devotees of the discipline will relish the movie. Others may just want to sample it. 

Breaking News (Johnnie To, 2004)

Richie Jen and Kelly Chen in Breaking News

Cast: Richie Jen, Kelly Chen, Nick Cheung, Eddie Cheung, Benz Hui, Lam Suet, Yong You, Ding Haifeng, Li Haitao, Simon Yam, Alan Chiu Chung-San, Maggie Shiu, Wong Chi-wai, Wong Wah-wo. Screenplay: Chan Hing-kai, Yip Tin-shing. Cinematography: Cheng Siu-keung. Production design: Bruce Yu. Film editing: David M. Richardson. Music: Ben Cheung, Chung Chi-wing.

Johnnie To's Breaking News treats media manipulation as if it were something new, which it isn't. It's been with us at least since FDR used radio for his "fireside chats" and Adolf Hitler hired Leni Riefensthal to make Triumph of the Will (1935). But propaganda is so much a part of our life that although To's thriller tells us nothing new, it cleverly integrates it into a standard cops-and-crooks plot. When a shootout between the police and the bad guys goes wrong, media-savvy police superintendent Rebecca Fong (Kelly Chen) takes over with a double aim: to catch the criminals and to save the department's reputation. The failed shootout takes place in a bravura opening sequence, in which Cheng Siu-keung's camera travels through, around, up, and over the scene with breathtaking, apparently uninterrupted fluidity. The movie barely rests after that's over. There are a few bobbles in the movie's storytelling, and it's sometimes hard to see who's shooting whom, but we're here for the chase, the suspense, and a few laughs, so nobody who really matters will mind. 

The Green, Green Grass of Home (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1982)

Cast: Kenny Bee, Chiang Ling, Yen Jing-Kuo, Meifeng Chen. Screenplay: Hou Hsiao-hsieng. Cinematography: Chen Kun-Hou. Art direction: Chi Kai-Cheng. Film editing: Liao Cheng-Sung. Music: Huang Mou-Shun. 

The cheerful naïveté of Hou Hsiao-hsien's third feature, The Green, Green Grass of Home, reminded me of the old Hollywood movies in which a city slicker comes to a small town where both he and the local yokels learn a few things from each other. In Hou's movie, Da-Nian (Kenny Bee) comes from Taipei to a village to teach school and immediately encounters unfamiliar attitudes and manners. Unabashedly sentimental, Hou's movie is laced with some comic scenes featuring mischievous kids, but it harps too much on a message about the necessity of being close to nature and it repetitively features an icky pop song that sounds a lot like a soft drink commercial. But it's beautifully filmed, and at its best, it affords a glimpse of what daily life might have been like in a Taiwanese village. 

The Castaways of Turtle Island (Jacques Rozier, 1976)

Jacques Villeret and Pierre Richard in The Castaways of Turtle Island

Cast: Pierre Richard, Jacques Villeret, Maurice Risch, René Gros, Bernard Dumaine, Lise Guicheron, Bernadette Palas, Maryse Viscard, Cléa de Oliveira, Alain Sarde, Jean François Balmer, Arlette Emmery. Screenplay: Jacques Rozier. Cinematography: Colin Mounier. Film editing: Jacques Rozier, Françoise Thévenot. Music: Dorival Caymmi, Nana Vasconcelos. 

The castaways of Jacques Rozier's satire on tourism don't know what they're in for, and frankly neither did I. The Castaways of Turtle Island is a grand muddle of a movie, starting with one plot line and then dropping it entirely for the main one: Two disgruntled employees at a tourist agency come up with the idea of offering something for the new breed of adventure tourist. They will find a desert island and drop their clients off there with no amenities, leaving them to fend for themselves in the manner of Robinson Crusoe. (The film was made 25 years before Survivor.) If you can endure 145 minutes of aimless humor and enigmatic characters, it's worth a watch, and at least the scenery is often lovely. But it failed to find an audience when it was originally released in France, and it's easy to see why.
 

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (Michael Haneke, 1994)

Lukas Miko in 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance

Cast: Gabriel Cosmin Urdes, Lukas Miko, Otto Grünmandl, Anne Bennent, Udo Samel, Branko Samarovski, Claudia Martini, Georg Friedrich, Alexander Pschill, Klaus Händl, Corina Eder, Dorothee Hartinger, Patricia Hirschbiegler, Barbara Nothegger. Screenplay: Michael Haneke. Cinematography: Christian Berger. Production design: Christoph Kanter. Film editing: Marie Homolkova. 

Is there a connection between individual violence and the collective violence of war? That seems to be the underlying question in Michael Haneke's 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, the third film in a trilogy about what the media call "senseless violence" that also contains The Seventh Continent (1989) and Benny's Video (1992). I think it's the best of the three because it avoids the element of melodrama that tinges the other two. In its fragmentary way, it follows the lives of several people in Vienna in the days leading up to what appears to be a too familiar act of random violence: a man firing a gun into a crowd of people in the lobby of a bank and then shooting himself. Intercut with these glimpses into their ill-fated lives are TV news reports about deadly conflicts in other places, including Somalia, Northern Ireland, and Bosnia. Haneke handles it all with his usual cold distancing, only occasionally yielding to flourishes of technique, as in an extended take that consists only of a young man named Max (Lukas Miko) repeatedly batting back Ping-Pong balls fired at him by a machine. That scene goes on so long that I for one kept wanting it to end, and felt relief when it did, which is exactly the effect Haneke wants to have on the viewer's nerves and patience. 

Lilies (John Greyson, 1996)

Brent Carver in Lilies

Cast: Marcel Sabourin, Aubert Pallascio, Jason Cadieux, Danny Gilmore, Matthew Ferguson, Brent Carver, Alexander Chapman, Rémy Girard, Ian D. Clark, Gary Farmer, Robert Lalonde, John Dunn-Hill. Screenplay: Michel Marc Bouchard, based on his play. Cinematography: Daniel Jobin. Production design: Sandra Kybartas. Film editing: André Corriveau. Music: Mychael Danna. 

John Greyson's Lilies is compounded of many elements: religious hypocrisy, small town homophobia, gender fluidity, the wrong man murder mystery, the revenge drama, the prison thriller, the Saint Sebastian legend, the play-within-a-play trope from Hamlet, and a dash of homoerotic nudity. It's no surprise that it doesn't hold together, but that it's fascinating nonetheless. The premise is that a distinguished Roman Catholic bishop has come to a prison in a rural area of Quebec to hear the confession of a dying man, only to have the tables turned on him when the man turns out to not to be dying and to have a score to settle with the bishop. Moreover, the prisoners have conspired with the chaplain to stage a play that will catch the conscience of the bishop. We see the play both as it might have been staged in the confines of the prison and opened up into the wider gaze of cinema, with the male inmates playing female roles in both the play and film segments. Like most plays turned into movies, it retains the suggestion that it might have worked better on the stage, but the novelty of the concept and the skill of the performers remain. 

July Rhapsody (Ann Hui, 2002)

Karena Lam and Jacky Cheung in July Rhapsody

Cast: Jacky Cheung, Anita Mui, Karena Lam, Shaun Tam, Eric Kot, Tou Chung-hua, Jin Hui, Leung Tin, Race Wong. Screenplay: Ivy Ho. Cinematography: Kuan Pun-leung. Production design: Man Lim-Chung. Film editing: Eric Kwong. Music: Tommy Wai. 

The Lams, Yiu-kwok (Jacky Cheung) and Man-ching (Anita Mui), have been married for 20 years. They live in a cramped Hong Kong high-rise apartment with their two sons, who can hear the couple fighting through the thin walls that separate the bedrooms. They're not intense fights, but rather the mostly low-key disagreements that arise between two people who've lived together for a long time and are nursing secrets. Yin-kwok, who teaches Chinese literature at an exclusive school, feels a little resentment that his choice of a profession that he loves has deprived him of the wealth enjoyed by not only his students but also his former classmates. Then a pretty student, Choi-lam (Karena Lam), starts flirting with him. Carefree and a bit spoiled, she enjoys leading him on. This teacher-student liaison, we discover, has a special significance for Yiu-kwok, one that figures in his own relationship with his wife and gives the narrative an extra layer. July Rhapsody is Ann Hui's variation on the domestic melodrama that arises from the familiar midlife crisis, lifted above its genre by lyrical elements and sensitive performances.