The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970)

Of all the hyphenated Jeans, Jean-Louis Trintignant seems to me the most interesting. He doesn't have the lawless sex appeal of Jean-Paul Belmondo, and he didn't grow up on screen in Truffaut films like Jean-Pierre Léaud, but his career has been marked by exceptional performances of characters under great internal pressure. From the young husband cuckolded by Brigitte Bardot in And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956) and the mousy law student in whom Vittorio Gassman tries to instill some joie de vivre in Il Sorpasso (Dino Risi, 1962), through the dogged but eventually frustrated investigator in Z (Costa-Gavras, 1969) and the Catholic intellectual who spends a chaste night with a beautiful woman in My Night at Maud's (Eric Rohmer, 1969), to the guilt-ridden retired judge in Three Colors: Red (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1994) and the duty-bound caregiver to an aged wife in Amour (Michael Haneke, 2012), Trintignant has compiled more than 60 years of great performances. His most popular film, A Man and a Woman (Claude Lelouch, 1966), is probably his least characteristic role: a romantic lead as a race-car driver, opposite Anouk Aimée. His role in The Conformist, one of his best performances, is more typical: the severely repressed Fascist spy, Marcello Clerici, who is sent to assassinate his old anti-Fascist professor (Enzo Tarascio). Marcello's desire to be "normal" is rooted in his consciousness of having been born to wealth but to parents who have abused it to the point of decadence, with the result that he becomes a Fascist and marries a beautiful but vulgar bourgeoise (Stefania Sandrelli). Bertolucci's screenplay places a heavier emphasis on Marcello's repression of homosexual desire than does its source, a novel by Alberto Moravia. In both novel and film, the young Marcello is nearly raped by the chauffeur, Lino (Pierre Clémenti), whom Marcello shoots and then flees. But in the film, Lino survives to be discovered by Marcello years later on the streets the night of Mussolini's fall. Marcello, whose conformity does an about-face, sics the mob on Lino by pointing him out as a Fascist, and in the last scene we see him in the company of a young male prostitute. This equating of gayness with corruption is offensive and trite, but very much of its era. Even the sumptuous production -- cinematography by Vittorio Storaro, design by Ferdinando Scarfiotti, music by Georges Delerue -- doesn't overwhelm the presence of Trintignant's intensely repressed Marcello, with his stiff, abrupt movements and his tightly controlled stance and walk. If The Conformist is a great film, much of its greatness comes from Trintignant's performance.

Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick, 1957)

Kirk Douglas and Adolphe Menjou in Paths of Glory

Col. Dax: Kirk Douglas
Cpl. Philippe Paris: Ralph Meeker
Gen. George Broulard: Adolphe Menjou
Gen. Paul Mireau: George Macready
Lt. Roget: Wayne Morris
Maj. Saint-Auban: Richard Anderson
German Singer: Christiane Kubrick
Cafe Owner: Jerry Hausner
Chief Judge: Peter Capell
Father Dupree: Emile Meyer
Sgt. Boulanger: Bert Freed
Pvt. Lejeune: Kem Dibbs
Pvt. Maurice Ferol: Timothy Carey
Shell-Shocked Soldier: Fred Bell
Capt. Rousseau: John Stein
Capt. Nichols: Harold Benedict

Director: Stanley Kubrick
Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick, Calder Willingham, Jim Thompson
Based on a novel by Humphrey Cobb
Cinematography: Georg Krause
Art direction: Ludwig Reiber
Film editing: Eva Kroll
Music: Gerald Fried

Kirk Douglas gives an uncharacteristically restrained performance in Paths of Glory, but the real star of the film is director Stanley Kubrick, who gives the big battle scene a kind of choreographed intensity. Kubrick had begun his career as a photographer for Look magazine and had been his own cinematographer on his early short films and his features Fear and Desire (1953) and Killer's Kiss (1955). Although the cinematographer for Paths of Glory is Georg Krause, it's easy to sense Kubrick's direction as he anticipates the battle scene's relentless motion with long takes and tracking shots in the earlier parts of the film, when the camera observes Gen. Broulard persuading Gen. Mireau to commit his troops to the suicidal assault on the German-held "Ant Hill." We follow Broulard and Mireau as they move through the opulent French headquarters (actually the Schleissheim Palace in Bavaria), circling each other as Broulard plays on Mireau's ambition and overcomes his resistance, Then we move to the trenches, a sharp contrast in setting from the palace, where the camera tracks Mireau as he walks down the long narrow ditch, greeting soldiers in a stiff, formulaic way and berating one who is stupefied by shell shock as a coward. The tracking shot of Mireau's tour of the trenches is then repeated with Col. Dax in the moments before the suicidal assault on the Ant Hill, although this time the air is full of smoke and debris from the shelling. Then Dax goes over the top, blowing a shrill whistle to lead his troops, and we have long lateral tracks punctuated by explosions and falling men. Film editor Eva Kroll's work adds to the power of the sequence. If the acting and the screenplay (by Kubrick, Calder Willingham, and Jim Thompson) were as convincing as the camerawork, Paths of Glory might qualify as the masterpiece that some think it is. Douglas, Menjou, and Macready are fine, and Wayne Morris and Ralph Meeker have a good scene together as members of a scouting party on the night before the battle, in which the drunkenness and cowardice of Morris's character has fatal consequences. But the scenes in which the three soldiers court-martialed for the failure of the assault face the prospect of the firing squad go on much too long, and are marred by the overacting of Timothy Carey as the "socially undesirable" Private Ferol and the miscasting of Emile Meyer, who usually played heavies, as Father Dupree. (Carey was actually fired from the film, and a double was used for some scenes.) And the film ends with a mawkish and unconvincing scene in which a captured German girl (the director's wife-to-be, Christiane Kubrick) reduces the French troops to tears with a folk song. Paths of Glory has to be described as a flawed classic.

Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2015)

Screenwriter Alex Garland's debut as director has a lot going for it: a tightly provocative and suspenseful Oscar-nominated screenplay (also by Garland), a superb trio of stars, and special effects that don't overwhelm the story. The effects won Oscars for Andrew Whitehurst, Paul Norris, Mark Williams Ardington, and Sara Bennett, overcoming competitors with far more flash and dazzle: Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller), The Martian (Ridley Scott), The Revenant (Alejandro González Iñárritu), and Star Wars: Episode VII -- The Force Awakens (J.J. Abrams). For once, special effects were kept on the human scale, largely to present Ava (Alicia Vikander) as the ambiguous cross between human being and robot on which the screenplay's exploration of the ethics of artificial intelligence depends. Ava (whose name is a variant spelling of "Eve") is the creation of Nathan (Oscar Isaac), a superwealthy tech genius who made his fortune with an Internet search engine not named Google, which he uses as the software for his experiment. He lures a young coder, Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), to his isolated retreat on the pretext that he wants Caleb to apply the Turing test on Ava. Nathan's unstated aims are far more extensive, and Caleb sees through them quickly. But neither of them is quite as quick on the uptake as Ava. Gleeson is convincingly geeky as Caleb, and Isaac, in yet another performance that establishes him as one of our most chameleonic actors, evokes the self-absorption and questionable ethics of any number of tech billionaires. But it's Vikander who steals the honors with Ava's sly mixture of naïveté and nascent cunning. The only thing I can fault Ex Machina for is a conventional sci-fi ending that feels out of keeping with the intelligent questioning of the middle part of the script and seems too much like a setup for a sequel.

Jackie Brown (Quentin Tarantino, 1997)

Pam Grier and Robert Forster in Jackie Brown

Sometimes called "the Tarantino movie for people who don't like Tarantino movies," Jackie Brown feels a bit like Tarantino under the influence of Martin Scorsese. That's not just because of the presence of Robert De Niro in the cast, but also because it's the Tarantino film that feels most under control, with its long takes and following shots. It's also the only Tarantino movie adapted from other material, in this case the novel Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard, which imposes a certain rhythm on the material, unlike Tarantino's usual jazzy riffs and variations. On the other hand, any time that Samuel L. Jackson (who is to Tarantino what De Niro used to be to Scorsese) is on screen, you can feel the obvious synergy between director and star. The real star, however, is Pam Grier, whose Jackie Brown is a force of nature, proud and statuesque, like Sophia Loren or Anna Magnani in their prime. Delivering her lines out of the side of her mouth, she's clearly in control even when things seem to be going against her. She's well-matched with Robert Forster's wearily implacable Max Cherry, a bail bondsman who can't help getting too involved with his clients. It's clear from the outset that Jackie and Max have what it takes to triumph just by sheer persistence over Jackson's flamboyant Ordell Robbie, not to mention his somewhat too stoned accomplices, Louis (De Niro) and Melanie (Bridget Fonda), and the wiseass ATF agent Ray Nicolette (Michael Keaton). The pleasure of the film consists largely in watching this gallery of top-notch actors go through the paces of the plot.

Three Colors (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1993, 1994)

I skipped a couple of days' postings because I wanted to watch all three films in Kieslowski's trilogy before writing about them. The trilogy was once a big deal, earning Kieslowski multiple awards, but I think its reputation has faded a bit. It's remarkably clever in its play on the three colors of the French flag, and its visual use of each one in the corresponding film, and in the way bits of action are used to link the three films, but I think the cleverness sometimes results in heavy-handedness.

Blue (1993)
The extraordinary cinematography of Slawomir Idziak and the performance by Juliette Binoche carry this first film in the trilogy, which takes liberté, the color signified by blue in the French tricolor, as its theme. Binoche plays Julie, who survives a car crash that kills her husband and daughter. Finding that she is unable to swallow the pills she obtains to commit suicide, she determines to live a completely detached life, doing nothing. Her husband, Patrice, was a famous composer, and Julie, also a composer, refuses to aid Olivier (Benoît Régent), her husband's sometime collaborator, in completing the concerto Patrice had been composing in celebration of the formation of the European Union. After sleeping with Olivier, Julie puts the estate she and her husband owned up for sale and tries to go into hiding, renting a small flat in Paris. But however much she tries to disengage herself from the world around her, Julie keeps being drawn back in. She refuses to sign a neighbor's petition to evict Lucille, a dancer in a strip club, thereby earning Lucille's gratitude. She is sought out by a boy who witnessed the fatal accident and wants to return a gold cross he found at the site and to tell her Patrice's last words -- the punch line to a joke he was telling when he lost control of the car. And she discovers that her husband had a mistress, who is carrying the child he didn't know he had conceived with her. All of this leads Julie to the realization that the liberty she had sought is illusory, that it can't be found in detachment but, to put it in terms of the tricolor, in conjunction with equality and fraternity -- treating Lucille as a equal, for example, and collaborating with Olivier to complete Patrice's concerto, which takes as text for its choral section the verses about love in 1 Corinthians. Visually beautiful with striking use of the titular color throughout, Blue has a romantic glossiness that takes away from the grit and urgency that it might have benefited from.

White (1994)
The middle film of the trilogy is a dark comedy about an exiled Polish hairdresser, Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski), whose French wife, Dominique (Julie Delpy), divorces him because of his impotence. Still desperately in love with Dominique, Karol finds himself homeless, playing tunes on a comb and tissue paper to earn small change in the Métro. Another Pole hears Karol playing a Polish song and strikes up an acquaintance, eventually helping Karol smuggle himself back to Poland in a large suitcase, which is stolen before Karol can emerge from it. After being dumped in a landfill, Karol makes his way home to his brother's beauty parlor, and begins a long process of rehabilitation, in which he makes a fortune, and devises an elaborate plot that involves faking his own death, with which he eventually gets even with Dominique, though the revenge is bittersweet. The screenplay, written by Kieslowski with his usual collaborator, Krzysztof Piesewicz, is ingeniously put together, though the theme of égalité is not quite so central to White as the corresponding color themes are to Blue and Red.  Zamachowski is impressive in his journey from victim to victor, but Delpy's role feels somewhat undeveloped. What could have attracted her to this schlub in the first place? As usual, there are some ingenious links between White and the other two films: Juliette Binoche's Julie can be glimpsed entering the courtroom where Karol and Dominique's divorce hearing is taking place, just as in Blue, we caught a glimpse of Delpy and Zamachowski from Julie's point of view in the same setting.

Red (1994)
Not only the last film in the trilogy, Red was also Kieslowski's final film before his death. He had announced his retirement after the release of the film, and died of complications from open-heart surgery in 1996. The film drew three Oscar nominations, for director, screenplay (Kieslowski and Krzysztof Piesewicz), and cinematography (Piotr Sobocinski). It deserved one for Jean-Louis Trintignant's performance as Joseph Kern, a retired judge who spends his time electronically eavesdropping on his neighbors' phone calls. Irène Jacob plays Valentine, a model who encounters Kern when she accidentally hits his dog with her car. The two strike up an unusual friendship as the beautiful young woman draws the misanthropic judge out of his self-imposed exile, ironically by awakening his conscience and causing him to turn himself in to the authorities who convict him of invasion of privacy. In the tricolor scheme, red stands fraternité, and the film delivers on the theme with Kern's emerging empathy. Again, the film links with its predecessors, both of which included scenes in which an elderly person, bent with age, struggles to force a plastic bottle into an aperture in a recycling bin. In Blue, Julie ignored and perhaps didn't even see the person's difficulty; Karol in Red notices but does nothing to help. Only Valentine sees and goes to the person's aid. But I find the ending of Red a little forced, in which the survivors of a disaster at see include not only Valentine, but also Julie and Olivier from Blue, and Karol and Dominique, who have somehow reunited despite the ending of White.

Punch-Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2002)

Adam Sandler in Punch-Drunk Love

Comedy in general often involves characters we would avoid in real life, and screwball comedy, of the type that flourished in the movies of the 1930s and '40s, tends to feature characters that we might otherwise have expected to be incarcerated or committed for treatment. Would we really hang out with Cary Grant's paleontologist and the leopard-coddling socialite Katharine Hepburn of Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938)? Wouldn't we call the cops on Barbara Stanwyck's con artist and shy away from the snake-hunting Henry Fonda of The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941)? But meeting them in movies is a delight. Punch-Drunk Love is a latter-day screwball comedy with a protagonist, Barry Egan (Adam Sandler), who verges on being a sociopath. At the beginning of the movie, he is standing on the sidewalk when a car crashes with a spectacular end-over-end flip, and just moments later, a van pulls up and deposits a harmonium on the street and drives off. Most of us would call the police and go in aid of the people in the crash, but Barry takes it all in his stride. We never hear about the crash again, and only the next day does Barry pick up the harmonium and move it into his office. (It's blocking the driveway to the row of businesses in which his oddball company is located.) The more we learn about Barry, the stranger he becomes: He has crying jags and violent outbursts, and he calls a phone-sex line -- giving them all manner of personal information including his Social Security number, which any sane person knows not to do -- and then just wants to chat with the woman who answers. Eventually, he falls in love with Lena Leonard (Emily Watson), a friend of Elizabeth (Mary Lynn Rajskub), one of his seven very annoying sisters. Miraculously, Lena accepts him for what he is. Baldly stated, none of Punch-Drunk Love really makes a lot of sense, and yet it turns into an oddly charming movie. Then again, this is a film written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, who gave us a denouement in Magnolia (1999) that included a rain of frogs. Whatever else you may say about Anderson -- like, for example, that he can be a very self-indulgent filmmaker -- he has a way of keeping us hooked, of luring us into a world of his own. He overlays scenes with odd percussive music composed by Jon Brion, and the song that accompanies Barry and Lena's big love scene is Harry Nilsson's "He Needs Me," sung by Shelley Duvall in Popeye (Robert Altman, 1980). Not to mention, of course, that he casts Sandler as his romantic lead, and has him wear a bright blue suit that seems to be made out of microfiber cleaning cloths. I have never seen any of Sandler's other films, and considering the reviews I probably won't, but he gives a very good performance here, somehow holding together a film that could have flown apart at any moment.

Two Days, One Night (Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne, 2014)

This scathing look by the Belgian Dardenne brothers at the exploitation of workers under contemporary capitalism owes much to postwar Italian neo-realism, especially Vittorio De Sica's classic Bicycle Thieves (1948). Marion Cotillard plays Sandra, a worker in a small business, who has been on medical leave for depression. Ready to return to work, she finds that the management has learned that it's more profitable to pay overtime to the workers who have been covering for her than to pay her salary, so they've had the workers vote on whether she should have her job back. If they decide against Sandra, they'll all receive one-time bonuses. The vote goes against her, but her friends at the company protest that one of the managers unfairly told some workers that no one would be safe from layoffs if Sandra is kept on. The management agrees on a revote by secret ballot, and Sandra, still fragile and popping Xanax like breath mints, is forced to spend the weekend before the revote canvassing the other employees, trying to persuade them to save her job. Cotillard, in an extraordinary, Oscar-nominated performance, portrays Sandra's journey from fragility to strength as she confronts sometimes hostile but often sympathetic co-workers to plead her case. The lure of the bonus proves strong: Two men come to blows over whether they should take the money or support Sandra, and one woman even leaves her abusive husband, who wants the money to fix up their patio. Sandra's tour of the industrial town in search of her fellow workers is reminiscent of Antonio's attempt in Bicycle Thieves to find the bicycle he needs in order to keep his job. The Dardennes mostly keep the film in a low key, so that Cotillard's work (and that of Fabrizio Rongione as Sandra's husband) shines through. The only serious bobble in the narrative comes when the despairing Sandra attempts suicide by swallowing her remaining supply of antidepressants, a moment that serves as a rather improbable turning-point for the character. And it's possible to object that the ending, in which Sandra is presented with a moral choice not unlike that her fellow workers face in their revote, is a little too formulaic. But Cotillard carries it off beautifully.

My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946)

Made in the twilight of the classic Western, there's something a little decadent about this West-as-it-never-was movie. In a few years, conventional Westerns would be all over TV, and Hollywood filmmakers would start turning out so-called "adult Westerns," films that did what they could to question the values and stereotypes that had been prevalent in the genre. Films like High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952) and Shane (George Stevens, 1953) would be lauded by intellectuals who would never have been caught dead at conventional Westerns. And even Ford would present a darker vision of the West's racism and brutality in The Searchers (1956). On the surface, My Darling Clementine looks like a fairy-tale version of the Old West, with its blithe disregard for actual geography: Tombstone, Ariz., and Monument Valley, Utah, are more than 350 miles apart, but Ford's movie puts the jagged buttes of the valley in every Tombstone back yard. The familiar tale of the shootout at the OK Corral has been turned into a clash of good (the Earps) vs. evil (the Clantons), in which the virtues of the former clan have been greatly exaggerated. There are some of the usual stereotypes: a drunken Indian and a Mexican (?) spitfire named Chihuahua (Linda Darnell). There's a virtuous young woman (Cathy Downs) from back east who tracks her man all the way west and when he's killed settles down to be the town schoolmarm. And yet, My Darling Clementine is one of the great Western movies in large part because Ford and screenwriters Samuel G. Engel and Winston Miller are so insouciant about their patent mythmaking. Henry Fonda is a tower of virtue as Wyatt Earp, infusing some of the integrity of his previous characters, Abraham Lincoln and Tom Joad, into the portrayal. Burly Victor Mature, though seemingly miscast as the consumptive Doc Holliday, gives a surprisingly good performance. And there's fine support from such Western standbys as Walter Brennan, Ward Bond, Tim Holt, and John Ireland. The black-and-white cinematography of Joseph MacDonald only seems to emphasize the good vs. evil fable, bringing something of the film noir to the Wild West.

Swann in Love (Volker Schlöndorff, 1984)

I certainly don't think that Proust's In Search of Lost Time couldn't, or shouldn't, be adapted to another medium: a well-produced miniseries might well do the trick. But for all the talent involved in this adaptation of the "Swann in Love" section of Swann's Way, the return on investment is slight: an opulent trifle, a pretty picture of the Belle Époque. The most significant contributions to the film are made by its production designer, Jacques Saulnier, and its cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, who keep the eye ravished even while the mind feels hunger pangs. There are some remarkable performances that make you feel that at least Proust has been read, including Fanny Ardant's Duchesse de Guermantes, Marie-Christine Barrault's wonderfully alive and vulgar Mme. Verdurin, and especially Alain Delon's Baron de Charlus. Yes, Proust's Charlus is fat where Delon is lean, but Delon's dissipated beauty -- he's like the picture of Dorian Gray when it had just begun to reflect its subject's debauchery -- and his sly appreciation of the Guermantes footmen give us something of the essential Charlus. I have a sense that Swann should be a good deal less handsome than Jeremy Irons and that Odette was not quite as sex-kittenish as Ornella Muti, but they move through their roles well even if their voices have been dubbed by French actors. (The dubbing is most noticeable in Irons's case, since his purring lisp has become so familiar over the years.) The screenplay, by Peter Brook, Jean-Claude Carrière, Marie-Hélène Estienne, and Schlöndorff, plucks scenes from here and there in the Search, not confined to the titular section, but fails to put it all together in a satisfying whole. If ever a case could be made for a voice-over narrator, reflecting Proust's own Narrator, I would think it would be here.

Bottle Rocket (Wes Anderson, 1996)

A little whimsy goes a long way, but too much is a bad thing if it turns terminally twee. The unique sensibility of Wes Anderson has kept it going for 20 years now, culminating in the best picture and best director nominations for The Grand Budapest Hotel (Anderson, 2012). Though Bottle Rocket was a box office flop, it was an auspicious debut for Anderson, as well as for its then-unknown stars, Luke and Owen Wilson. (The latter also co-wrote the screenplay with Anderson.) Bottle Rocket inevitably became a cult film, building on what seems like a sly parody of Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, 1992) mixed with a bit of Coen brothers tongue-in-cheekery. All that it lacks is Bill Murray -- it's the only Anderson film in which he doesn't appear -- but his special above-it-all manner is aptly supplied in Bottle Rocket by James Caan. Anyone coming to this movie in search of characters with fully fleshed-out backstories -- like, why was Anthony (Luke Wilson) suffering from the "exhaustion" that led him to commit himself to the posh, low-security mental institution from which he "escapes" at the movie's beginning? -- is going to be sadly disappointed. The effect is more shaggy-dog than Reservoir Dogs. It's a film that features among other things, a heist on that least likely of targets, a book store, and probably the most thoroughly planned and ineptly executed robbery ever put on film. It's also one of those movies that are perhaps even funnier when you try to remember them afterward and figure out what the hell you just watched.