Joy (David O. Russell, 2015)

A thoroughly conventional movie with an exceptional cast that features what seems to be the core of writer-director David O. Russell's stock company, Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper, Joy is the kind of feel-good underdog-against-the-odds movie with screwball touches that could have been made at almost any time in Hollywood history. I can easily imagine it in the 1940s with Rosalind Russell and Fred MacMurray, for example. Joy Mangano (Lawrence) was a brilliant student in high school, but she didn't go on to college, and now struggles to make ends meet, while dabbling with ideas for inventions. A divorcee, she lives in an unusual household: In addition to her two children and her grandmother (Diane Ladd), the ménage also includes Joy's mother (Virginia Madsen), who spends her days in bed watching soap operas, and Joy's ex-husband (Edgar Ramirez), who lives in the basement. Joy's father (Robert De Niro) also joins the household after splitting from his latest wife, but he soon takes up with Trudy, a wealthy widow (Isabella Rossellini). When Joy comes up with the idea for a self-wringing mop, Trudy agrees to help finance it. Joy has to contract the manufacture of some of the mop's parts, and she struggles to market it until the idea comes to sell it on TV. She approaches the QVC shopping channel, where an executive, Neil Walker (Cooper), takes an interest in the product. It becomes a big seller, but then the company Joy contracted to make the parts claims ownership of the design. Facing bankruptcy, Joy fights the claim, wins, and becomes a huge success, marketing other household products. There's a real-life Joy Mangano on whose story the film is based, with the usual disregard for accuracy. Lawrence got an Oscar nomination for her performance, which is, as always, wonderful. She gives the film more than it deserves, and the supporting cast measures up to her. But there are few surprises in the story or in Russell's treatment of it, unlike his previous films with Lawrence and Cooper, Silver Linings Playbook (2012) and American Hustle (2013).

The Antoine Doinel Cycle

The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959)

Jean-Pierre Léaud in The 400 Blows

Antoine Doinel: Jean-Pierre Léaud
Julien Doinel: Albert Rémy
Gilberte Doinel: Claire Maurier
René Bigey: Patrick Auffay
M. Bigey: Georges Flamant

Director: François Truffaut
Screenplay: François Truffaut, Marcel Moussy
Cinematography: Henri Decaë
Music: Jean Constantin

One of the unquestioned great movies, and one of the greatest feature-film directing debuts, The 400 Blows would still resonate with film-lovers even if François Truffaut hadn't gone on to create four sequels tracking the life and loves of his protagonist, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud). There are, in fact, those who think that the last we should have seen of Antoine was the haunting freeze-frame at the end of the film. But Antoine continued to grow up on screen, and perhaps more remarkably, so did Léaud, carving out his own career after his debut as a 13-year-old. (It's hard to think of any American child actors who were able to maintain a film career into adulthood as well as Léaud did. Mickey Rooney? Dean Stockwell? Who else?) Having Truffaut as a mentor certainly helped, but Léaud had an unmistakable gift. He is on screen for virtually all of the 99-minute run time, and provides a gallery of memorable moments: Antoine in the amusement-park centrifuge, Antoine in the police lockup, Antoine on the run -- in cinematographer Henri Decaë's brilliant long tracking shot. And my personal favorite moment: when the psychologist asks Antoine if he's ever had sex. Léaud responds with a beautiful mixture of surprise, amusement, and embarrassment. It's so genuine a response that I have to think it was improvised, that Truffaut surprised Léaud with the question. But even so, Léaud never drops character in his response. This praise of Léaud is not to undervalue the magnificent supporting cast, or the haunting score by Jean Constantin. It's a film in which everything works.

Antoine and Colette (François Truffaut, 1962)

Jean-Pierre Léaud and Marie-France Pisier in Antoine and Colette

Antoine Doinel: Jean-Pierre Léaud
Colette: Marie-France Pisier
Colette's Mother: Rosy Varte
Colette's Stepfather: François Darbon
René: Patrick Auffay
Albert Tazzi: Jean-François Adam

Director: François Truffaut
Screenplay: François Truffaut
Cinematography: Raul Coutard
Music: Georges Delerue

Four years after he made The 400 Blows, Truffaut was asked to contribute to an anthology of short films by directors from various countries to be called Love at Twenty. As he had with the first film, Truffaut drew on his own experience, an infatuation with a girl he had met at the Cinémathèque Française. And since Léaud was available -- he had worked with Julien Duvivier on Boulevard (1960) after completing The 400 Blows -- it made sense for him to play Antoine Doinel again. A narrator tells us that Antoine had been sent to another reform school after escaping from the first, and that this time he had responded well to a psychologist: After leaving school, he has found a job working for the Phillips record company and is living on his own. Then he sees a pretty young woman at a concert of music by Berlioz and falls for her. Colette is not much interested in him, but she is evidently flattered by his advances. Her parents like Antoine and encourage him so much that he rents a room across the street from them. (Truffaut had done the same thing during his crush.) But one evening when he comes to dinner at their apartment, a man named Albert calls on Colette and she leaves Antoine watching TV with her parents. It's a droll little film, scarcely more than an anecdote, and the stable, lovestruck Antoine doesn't seem much like either the rebellious Antoine of the first film or the more scattered Antoine of the later ones in the cycle.

Stolen Kisses (François Truffaut, 1968)

Jean-Pierre Léaud in Stolen Kisses

Antoine Doinel: Jean-Pierre Léaud
Christine Darbon: Claude Jade
Georges Tabard: Michael Lonsdale
Fabienne Tabard: Delphine Seyrig
M. Blady: Michael Lonsdale
Mme. Darbon: Claire Duhamel
Lucien Darbon: Daniel Ceccaldi

Director: François Truffaut
Screenplay: François Truffaut, Claude de Givray, Bernard Revon
Cinematography: Denys Clerval
Music: Antoine Duhamel

The Antoine of Stolen Kisses is in his 20s, but has reverted to the more haphazard ways of his adolescence: He has been kicked out of the army, and now relies on a series of odd jobs to get by. But he has also renewed acquaintance with a young woman he met before going into the army, Christine Darbon. Like Colette's parents, hers are quite taken with Antoine, and they help him get a job as a night clerk in a hotel. He gets fired from that job after helping a private detective who is spying on an adulterous couple, but the detective helps Antoine get a job with his agency. While working for the detective agency, he has to pose as a clerk in a shoe store, and winds up in a liaison with the store owner's wife, Fabienne. When that ends badly, he becomes a TV repairman, which brings him back to Christine, with whom he winds up in bed after trying to fix her TV. At the film's end, a strange man who has been following Christine comes up to her and Antoine in the park and declares his love for her. She says he must be crazy, and Antoine, who perhaps recognizes his earlier infatuation with Colette in the man's obsession, murmurs, "He must be." Stolen Kisses is the loosest, funniest entry in the cycle, though it was made at a time when Truffaut was politically preoccupied: The film opens with a shot of the shuttered gates of the Cinémathèque Française, which was shut down in a conflict between its director, Henri Langlois, and culture minister André Malraux. This caused an uproar involving many of the directors of the French New Wave. Some of Antoine's anarchic approach to life may have been inspired by the rebelliousness toward the establishment prevalent in the film community. But it's clear that the idea of a cycle of Antoine Doinel films has been brewing in Truffaut's mind: There is a cameo appearance by Marie-France Pisier as Colette and Jean-François Adam as Albert, now married and the parents of an infant.

Bed and Board (François Truffaut, 1970)

Claude Jade and Jean-Pierre Léaud in Bed and Board

Antoine Doinel: Jean-Pierre Léaud
Christine Darbon Doinel: Claude Jade
Mme. Darbon: Claire Duhamel
Lucien Darbon: Daniel Ceccaldi
Kyoko: Hiroko Berghauer

Director: François Truffaut
Screenplay: François Truffaut, Claude de Givray, Bernard Revon
Cinematography: Néstor Almendros
Music: Antoine Duhamel

Antoine and Christine have married, and they have settled down in a small apartment. (There's some indication that it's paid for by her parents.) She gives violin lessons and he sells flowers -- carnations, which he dyes, using some environmentally questionable potions. But settling down isn't in Antoine's nature, and when Christine gets pregnant he looks for more lucrative work. He finds a curious sinecure in a company run by an American: Antoine maneuvers model ships by remote control through a mockup of a harbor. ("It gives me time to think," he says.) One day, a Japanese businessman comes to see the demonstration, accompanied by a pretty translator named Kyoko (Hiroko Berghauer), and Antoine is soon involved in an affair with her. Naturally, this precipitates a breakup, though by film's end they have seemingly reconciled. Still, it's obvious that the marriage is not destined to be permanent. They can't even agree on a name for their son: She wants him to be called Ghislain, and he wants to call him Alphonse. Antoine wins out by a trick: He's the one who goes to the registry office to legalize the boy's name. Antoine also spends time writing a novel about his boyhood, to which Christine objects: "I don't like this business of writing about your childhood, dragging your parents through the mud. I don't know much but I do know one thing: If you use art to settle accounts, it's no longer art." Truffaut had his own regrets about the portrait of his parents in The 400 Blows. Less farcical than Stolen Kisses, Bed and Board still has a strong vein of comedy tinged with melancholy.

Love on the Run (François Truffaut, 1979)

Claude Jade and Jean-Pierre Léaud in Love on the Run

Antoine Doinel: Jean-Pierre Léaud
Colette Tazzi: Marie-France Pisier
Christine Doinel: Claude Jade
Liliane: Dani
Sabine Barnerias: Dorothée
Xavier Barnerias: Daniel Mesguich
M. Lucien: Julien Bertheau

Director: François Truffaut
Screenplay: François Truffaut, Marie-France Pisier, Jean Aurel, Suzanne Schiffman
Cinematography: Néstor Almendros
Music: Georges Delerue

Truffaut admitted that he wasn't happy with the final film in the cycle. It's a bit too heavily reliant on flashback clips from the four earlier films, and if it's intended to show that Antoine has finally stabilized now that he's in his 30s and divorced from Christine, it doesn't quite make the case. He has a new girlfriend, Sabine, his novel has been published several years earlier, and he works as a proofreader for a printing house. He's on friendly terms with Christine, and agrees to take their son, Alphonse, to the train station when the boy leaves for a summer music camp. At the station, he runs into Colette, now a defense lawyer, who is on her way to confer with a client -- a man who has murdered his 3-year-old boy. Perhaps a little too coincidentally, Colette is involved with Sabine's brother, Xavier, and having encountered Antoine before, she has bought a copy of his novel to read on the train. Antoine impulsively boards the train, and sets up a meeting with Colette in the dining car, after which she invites him back to her compartment. All of this sets up a series of revelations: Colette's marriage to Albert broke up after their small daughter was killed by a car. She claims that she supplements her small income as a lawyer by prostituting herself with men she meets on trains. Antoine finally made peace with his mother after her death when he met her old lover, M. Lucien, who persuaded him to visit his mother's grave. (There is a flashback to the scene in The 400 Blows when Antoine, playing hooky, sees his mother kissing a strange man on the street.) Antoine became infatuated with Sabine after hearing a man in a phone booth arguing with a woman on the other end of the line and then tearing up her photograph. Antoine picked up the pieces from the floor, put them together, and after some sleuthing, discovered the woman was Sabine. His marriage to Christine finally broke up after he slept with her friend Liliane, who he previously had thought was having a lesbian relationship with Christine. And so on. The result of all the flashbacks and revelations is not to round out the Antoine Doinel saga, but to make Love on the Run feel over-contrived. Marie-France Pisier, incidentally, contributed to the screenplay, which is mostly by Truffaut. 

Blood Simple (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 1984)

So many of the Coen brothers' best films, like Miller's Crossing (1990), Fargo (1996), and No Country for Old Men (2007), are about plans that backfire, that it's no surprise their first feature, Blood Simple, has a plot that hinges on just that. When Texas bar owner Julian Marty (Dan Hedaya) discovers that his wife, Abby (Frances McDormand), is having an affair with one of his bartenders, Ray (John Getz), he hires a private detective, Visser (M. Emmet Walsh), who discovered the affair, to kill them. But Visser has other ideas: He finds Ray and Abby asleep in Ray's bed, takes a picture of them, and steals Abby's gun. Then he doctors the photograph to make it look like he has shot them to death, collects the reward from Marty, and then shoots Marty with Abby's gun to frame her for his murder. But wait, there's more! It involves the fact that Marty is not (yet) dead, that he kept a copy of the doctored photo in his safe when he paid off Visser, and that Visser accidentally left his cigarette lighter behind in Marty's office. And so on, as almost everyone gets what's coming to them. Blood Simple may be just a tad over-plotted, and there are a few things that seem too contrived -- Visser's carelessness with the lighter, for one. But on the whole, it's good nasty fun, with some solid performances. McDormand, in her first film role, is strikingly pretty, and manages a remarkable character transition from naïveté to resourcefulness. Walsh and Hedaya, two reliable character actors, make the most of their juicy roles. Cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld and composer Carter Burwell, both making their feature film debuts, help craft the film's very effective noir atmosphere.

The Ear (Karel Kachyna, 1970)

Radoslav Brzobohaty and Jirina Bohdolová in The Ear

When an older movie I've never heard of by a director I've only vaguely heard of (and whose work I've never seen) turns up on Turner Classic Movies, I feel obliged to check it out. So it was with The Ear, which turns out to be not only a fascinating bit of political history but also unnervingly relevant to our own current political situation. It's not that I expect the United States in 2017 to turn into Czechoslovakia in 1970, but these are anxious times when a film about political paranoia can't help but touch nerves. Karel Kachyna was part of the Czech New Wave, filmmakers like Milos Forman, Ivan Passer, and Jiri Menzel who took advantage of a looser attitude toward dissent on the part of the Communist Party in mid-1960s Czechoslovakia. Unfortunately, The Ear was made toward the end of that period of relative tolerance, and it was suppressed by the government under pressure from the Soviet Union. It wasn't released until 1989, after the collapse of European communism. It turns out to be a remarkable portrait of a marriage stretched to the breaking point by political tension. Ludvik (Radoslav Brzobohaty) is a mid-level official in the Communist Party bureaucracy. He and his wife, Anna (Jirina Bohdolová) come home from a Party function one evening to discover an unlocked gate and other signs that someone has entered their house while they were away. When they also find that the phone doesn't work and the power is off, they suspect the worst: The Party has been snooping. They know the consequences well: exile or imprisonment at the least. They already suspect that their home has been bugged -- they call it "The Ear" -- all along, but figure that it was confined to their bedroom. Ludvik recalls events at the party they have attended and begins to put the worst interpretation possible on them, signs that he's about to be purged. To make matters worse, they haven't been getting along. Anna is an alcoholic and has had an affair. So as Ludvik begins trying to destroy papers that the Party might find incriminating -- burning them and flushing them down the toilet, to the point that he sets the toilet seat on fire -- Anna keeps up a steady stream of resentful accusations. Eventually, they discover that "ears" are everywhere: listening devices tucked in every nook and cranny of the house. Their rancor turns to mutual support and even affection. It turns out that Ludvik is not being purged after all: He's being promoted. But that only causes them to realize that their plight has worsened: If they were under surveillance before, how much more will they be subjected to now? The relationship of Anna and Ludvik has been compared to that of George and Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? but with the added political tension, and Brzobohaty and Bohdolová play it brilliantly. The screenplay is by Kachyna and his frequent collaborator Jan Procházka. Cinematographer Josef Illik shoots many scenes as if lit by the candelabra Anna and Ludvik are carrying around the darkened house, creating a visual correlative for the uncertainty that surrounds the couple.

World on a Wire (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1973)

What we call "reality" is, as we all know now, a construct, the product of the limitations of our senses. But what if we, too, are part of the construct, put here by some other entity and blinded to the reality that lies beyond the senses? That way lies religion -- "Now we see through a glass darkly...." -- and metaphysics -- now largely dismissed as "asking unanswerable questions" -- but also science fiction. Witness the popularity of a film like The Matrix (Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski, 1999) and its sequels. In fact, Rainer Werner Fassbinder got there more than two decades before the Wachowskis. In 1973 he created a two-part television series, World on a Wire, that aired in Germany, and then became a kind of cult hit via file-sharing on the internet before being restored in 2010 and screened at the Berlin Film Festival. In it, a German research institute has created a simulated world in its supercomputer. The inhabitants of this world have been given consciousness, but only one of them has knowledge of the world outside the computer. He serves as a contact between the programmers and the simulated beings. But then the sudden death of the head of the program puts his second-in-command, Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch), in charge of investigating not only the death of his predecessor but also the suicide of one of the simulated beings. Stranger and stranger things begin to happen, until Stiller learns that he is also a simulation in his own simulated world. He also learns that the institute's simulated world is being used for commercial purposes, something that violates its agreement with the government funding it. As he comes to terms with this knowledge, his increasingly erratic behavior makes him a target for assassins, and his one hope is to find the contact with the level above that's simulating him. Got that? The head-spinning premise of the film comes from a novel, Simulacron-3, by the American writer Daniel F. Galouye, adapted by Fassbinder and Fritz Müller-Scherz. Fassbinder gives it a good deal of his characteristic style in the adaptation: The women in Stiller's world, for example, always wear cocktail dresses, even at work, and rooms are filled with mirrors to suggest the layers of reflected reality in the three levels. The costume designer is Gabriele Pillon and the production design is by Horst Giese, Walter Koch, and Kurt Raab. It was filmed in 16 mm for television, which means there's some graininess and focus problems in some parts of the restored film, but the cinematography is by Fassbinder's frequent collaborator Michael Ballhaus, along with Ulrich Prinz. Löwitsch is very good as Stiller, taking on kind of James Bondian role, and the paranoid atmosphere prevails even when the plot gets a bit snarled in its own premise.

Two With Marcello Mastroianni

A Slightly Pregnant Man (Jacques Demy, 1973)

Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni in A Slightly Pregnant Man

Irène de Fontenoy: Catherine Deneuve
Marco Mazetti: Marcello Mastroianni
Dr. Delavigne: Micheline Presle
Maria Mazetti: Marisa Pavan

Director: Jacques Demy
Screenplay: Jacques Demy
Cinematography: Andréas Winding
Production design: Bernard Evein
Music: Michel Legrand

A Special Day (Ettore Scola, 1977)

Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren in A Special Day

Antonietta: Sophia Loren
Gabriele: Marcello Mastroianni
Emanuele: John Vernon
Caretaker: Françoise Berd

Director: Ettore Scola
Screenplay: Ruggero Maccari, Ettore Scola, Maurizio Costanzo
Cinematography: Pasqualino De Santis
Production design: Luciano Ricceri

The great charm of Marcello Mastroianni lies, I think, in the fact that he always seems to be the odd man out. Despite his good looks and sex appeal, there is always the sense that the characters he plays, even though they attract women on the order of Catherine Deneuve and Sophia Loren, are never quite in charge of the world they inhabit. Certainly this is true of his most famous roles, Marcello in La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960) and Guido in 8 1/2 (Fellini, 1963). And directors Jacques Demy and Ettore Scola exploit this otherness in Mastroianni in very different ways: Demy in the satiric A Slightly Pregnant Man and Scola in the earnest A Special Day. In the former film, whose French title was the lengthy L'Événement le plus important depuis que l'homme a marché sur la Lune (The Most Important Event Since Man Walked on the Moon), Mastroianni plays Marco, a driving-school instructor who feels out of sorts and goes to see a doctor who decides that he must be pregnant. When a well-known specialist confirms the diagnosis and presents his findings to other scientists, the press goes wild and the advertising department for a maternity-wear company launches a campaign for male maternity clothes. Marco winds up on posters everywhere, and he and his fiancée, Irène, begin to make big plans for the money the company pays him. Eventually, the diagnosis proves to be false, however, and the film concludes with an anticlimactic thud. Demy, whose best-known work is probably the cotton-candy musicals The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), seems to have launched into his screenplay with no sense of how to end it satisfactorily. Until that point, however, Mastroianni and Deneuve have fun with their roles. Forgoing her usual sophisticated chic, she plays a somewhat blowsy beauty-shop owner. A Special Day earned Mastroianni one of his three Oscar nominations, partly because there's nothing the Academy likes better than a straight actor daring to play gay. He is Gabriele, a radio announcer who has lost his job because the Fascists have begun purging the work force of "undesirables." The day is May 8, 1938, when Hitler visits Mussolini in Rome to solidify their alliance. He lives in a large apartment complex with windows facing an open courtyard. Across the way lives Antonietta, a woman with an abusive husband and six children. On this day, she has stayed home to clean house after sending her family off to the parades and speeches, but when the family's pet mynah bird escapes and flies out into the courtyard, she asks Gabriele's help in retrieving him. They are virtually the only people left in the complex other than the nosy, gossipy concierge, whose radio is blaring the news of the day -- Fascist anthems, speeches, the cheers of the crowd, and a running patriotic commentary -- which serves as the sometimes ironic counterpoint to the growing intimacy of the mismatched couple. A severely deglamourized Loren gives a fine performance, as does Mastroianni: Gabriele is aware that at any moment he may be taken away to a concentration camp, and he vacillates between suicide and a carpe diem fatalism. The film is a little too predictable, and although the screenplay by Scola and Ruggero Maccari is original, it feels somewhat like an adaptation of a two-character stage play. Pasqualino De Santis's cinematography, using long takes and tracking shots through the apartment complex (which we never leave except in the archival newsreel footage at the film's beginning), helps open it up.  

The Great McGinty (Preston Sturges,1940)

Poster with the British title for The Great McGinty

The attitude of Hollywood in the studio era toward screenwriters is usually summed up by the epithet "schmucks with typewriters," which has been attributed to various studio heads, or the sexist joke about the ambitious starlet who was "so dumb she slept with the writer." No one was more aware of the attitude than Preston Sturges, who had been a Hollywood screenwriter for a decade. He had seen several of his scripts mangled in the hands of other directors, so he is said to have made a deal with Paramount: He would sell them the script for what became The Great McGinty for $10 if they would let him direct it. They agreed, grudgingly, and the film was a hit, launching Sturges a career as one of the great writer-directors and winning him his only Oscar -- for the screenplay. There are glimpses in the movie of what Sturges would become: a great, irreverent satirist with a gift for screwball comedy. But on the whole, it's a more serious movie than we're accustomed to from him. It's told in flashback: McGinty (Brian Donlevy) is a bartender in a south-of-the-border saloon, who recounts his fall from grace -- ironically because "he never did anything honest in his whole life, except for one crazy minute." As a tramp, he was offered a bribe for his vote in a big-city election, and he discovered that the more he voted in that election the more money he could make. This got the attention of the city's political boss (Akim Tamiroff), who remade McGinty into a successful candidate for alderman, then for mayor. In order to get elected, he needed a wife, so his secretary, Catherine (Muriel Angelus), agreed to an in-name-only marriage. Eventually, however, they fell in love, and Catherine made him change his ways. He was elected governor, and tried to go straight, but this led the boss to fire a gun at McGinty, and they both wound up in jail. At the end, we see that the boss is now the owner of the bar McGinty tends. The somewhat low-wattage cast was forced on Sturges. Angelus is a rather pallid heroine, and Donlevy's performance shows why he never became a major star. But as his later films demonstrate, Sturges knew something about the texture that a colorful supporting cast could bring to a film, so we get standout work from Tamiroff, and William Demarest, who appeared in eight films Sturges directed and two more that he wrote, plays another politico. Another future key member of Sturges's stock company, Jimmy Conlin, has a bit part.

Two by Jean Renoir

Boudu Saved From Drowning (Jean Renoir, 1932)

Michel Simon in Boudu Saved From Drowning

Priape Boudu: Michel Simon
Édouard Lestingois: Charles Granval
Emma Lestingois: Marcelle Hainia
Chloë Anne Marie: Sévérine Lerczinska
Vigour: Jean Gehret
Godin: Max Dalban
A Student: Jean Dasté

Director: Jean Renoir
Screenplay: Jean Renoir, Albert Valentin
Based on a play by René Fauchois
Cinematography: Georges Asselin

A Day in the Country (Jean Renoir, 1936)

Sylvia Bataille and Georges D'Arnoux in A Day in the Country

Henriette: Sylvia Bataille
Henri: Georges D'Arnoux
Madame Dufour: Jane Marken
Monsieur Dufour: André Gabriello
Rodolphe: Jacques B. Brunius
Anatole: Paul Temps
Grandmother: Gabrielle Fontan
Uncle Poulain: Jean Renoir
Waitress: Marguerite Renoir

Director: Jean Renoir
Screenplay: Jean Renoir
Based on a story by Guy de Maupassant
Cinematography: Claude Renoir
Music: Joseph Kosma

"Épater la bourgeoisie!" went the rallying cry of France's 19th-century poets like Baudelaire and Rimbaud, who styled themselves as "Decadents." But ever since Molière's M. Jourdain, the social-climbing bourgeois gentilhomme, was delighted to discover that he was speaking prose, French artists of whatever medium have delighted themselves in satirizing the manners and morals of the middle class, sometimes affectionately and sometimes savagely. On my living room wall I have two prints of cartoons done by Honoré Daumier in a series he called "Pastorales." Both show very solidly middle-class and middle-aged couples, presumably Parisians taking a day in the country. In one, the husband carries his large, copiously clad wife on his back as he fords a small stream that barely comes to his ankles. They have evidently been caught in a summer storm, for he is chiding her that such things are to be expected, even on the sunniest day. Meanwhile, she is urging him, "Ah, Jules, don't let the torrent sweep us away!" In the other, a similarly clad woman sits on the bank of a pond in which her husband, wearing his glasses and with his head wrapped in a handkerchief, has been taking a dip. "The water is delicious, Virginie," he says. "I assure you, you're making a mistake by not joining me." I was reminded of these prints while watching Jean Renoir's great short film -- it's only 40 minutes long, but every minute is golden -- A Day in the Country. In it, the Dufour family -- husband, wife, daughter, future son-in-law, and comically deaf grandmother -- find a country inn in a beautiful setting on their day away from the city. The mother and daughter immediately become targets for two young men, who manage to set off with them in their skiffs on the river, after diverting the other men by lending them fishing poles. The daughter, Henriette, goes with Henri. When a storm comes up, they take shelter in the woods, where she yields to his advances. Years later, she returns to the same spot with her husband, Anatole, an unromantic drip, and while he naps, she encounters Henri and recalls their brief encounter. The film is an exquisite mix of comedy and melancholy, the kind of subtle blending of tones Renoir is known for from his greatest films, The Grand Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939). A Day in the Country was in fact never finished -- weather interrupted the shooting and Renoir had to move on to another commitment -- but the existing footage was assembled ten years later under the supervision of the producer, Pierre Braunberger, with two explanatory intertitles, and it stands on its own as a masterwork. In sharp contrast to the affectionately amused treatment of the bourgeoisie in A Day in the Country, Boudu Saved From Drowning is a raucous free-for-all centered on the great eccentric Michel Simon in the title role. Boudu is a tramp, a shaggy monster, who after his dog runs away decides to drown himself in the Seine. But he is rescued by Édouard Lestingois, a bookseller, who takes him into his home. Boudu proceeds to trash the place and seduce both Mme. Lestingois and the housemaid, who is also Lestingois' mistress. Simon's performance pulls out all the stops in one of the greatest comic tours de force in film history. If you want to see what épater la bourgeoisie really means, just watch Boudu.   

The Man Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock, 1934)

Peter Lorre, Leslie Banks, and Nova Pilbeam in The Man Who Knew Too Much

The first version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, which he remade in 1956, was Alfred Hitchcock's breakthrough film, a critical and popular success that also established Peter Lorre as in international star. It was Lorre's first English-language film; in 1933 he had left Germany, where he had made his reputation in M (Fritz Lang, 1931), because of the rise of the Nazis. He is said to have learned his role in Hitchcock's film phonetically. His performance is perhaps the most memorable thing about The Man Who Knew Too Much, which sometimes feels slack and disjointed, as if Hitchcock hadn't yet mastered the technique of seeing the film as a whole. Hitchcock told François Truffaut, "The first version is the work of a talented amateur and the second was made by a professional." Lorre plays Abbott, the mastermind of a group of radicals who are plotting the assassination of the leader of a European country -- the politics are the film's MacGuffin, a vague motive that spurs the action. When Bob Lawrence (Leslie Banks) accidentally learns of the plot, his daughter (Nova Pilbeam) is kidnapped to prevent him from going to the police, but his wife (Edna Best) manages to foil the assassination by screaming when she spots the killer at the point in a concert at the Royal Albert Hall when a cymbal crash is supposed to cover the sound of the gun. Even so, there's a lot of action left as Lawrence frantically tries to rescue his daughter while the police shoot it out with the bad guys. Banks and Best are a rather pallid couple -- he's given to "stiff upper lip, old girl" exhortations, and although she's a champion sharpshooter who fires the shot that kills the assassin, she has little to do the rest of the time but dither and emit that crucial scream -- so it's no wonder that Lorre steals the film.

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Pedro Almodóvar, 1988)

Pedro Almodóvar's brightly colored farce Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown put him on the map as an auteur to be reckoned with. It's a grand stew of a film that takes the premise of Jean Cocteau's serious play La Voix Humaine and turns it into a nod to classic Hollywood screwball comedy touched with feminism and the brand of liberated hedonism peculiar to post-Franco Spain. It's also a superb product of the gay sensibility, to the point that it's easy to imagine the roles of Pepa (Carmen Maura), Candela (Maria Barranco), Marisa (Rossy de Palma), and Lucia (Julieta Serrano) played by drag queens. But although it verges on camp -- Pepa, a soap opera actress, dubs Joan Crawford's voice in a Spanish release of Nicholas Ray's perhaps unintentionally camp Western Johnny Guitar (1954) -- it has at its core Almodóvar's genuine affection for his characters. The gloriously sunny decor of the film is the product of set decorators José Salcedo and Félix Murcia, and the costumes are by José María de Cossío. The cinematographer is Almodóvar's frequent collaborator José Luis Alcaine.