Le Bonheur (Agnès Varda, 1965)

François Chevalier: Jean-Claude Drouot
Thérèse Chevalier: Claire Drouot
Émilie Savignard: Marie-France Boyer
Gisou Chevalier: Sandrine Drouot
Pierrot Chevalier: Olivier Drouot

Director: Agnès Varda
Screenplay: Agnès Varda
Cinematography: Claude Beausoleil, Jean Rabier
Film editing: Janine Verneau

A summer idyll set to the music of Mozart -- what could be more charming and pleasant, especially when it's filmed in such ravishingly beautiful color? It features a handsome young working-class couple, François and Thérèse, and their two adorably well-behaved children. He's a carpenter, she's a dressmaker, and they are obviously blissful, taking the kids on excursions in the countryside where, while the little ones nap, they make love. Happiness indeed. And then he goes on a business trip and meets the very pretty Émilie who works in the post office and is about to move to the very Parisian suburb, Fontenay-aux-Roses, where François and Thérèse live. He agrees to build shelves in Émilie's new apartment and she becomes his mistress. This doesn't diminish his love for Thérèse, however. Indeed, it only increases his happiness. He's so happy, in fact, that Thérèse notices it and, one day when they're on an excursion to the countryside and the children are down for their naps again, she asks him why he has become so happy lately. After hedging for a few moments, he tells her the truth. He explains that they and the children are like an apple orchard in a field, and that one day he saw another apple tree growing outside the field, blooming along with them: "More flowers, more apples," he burbles. Thérèse not only seems to understand this analogy, but she and François then make passionate love. But at this point Agnès Varda's carefully crafted idyll turns savagely, searingly ironic -- which is what we should have known this portrait of an improbably perfect family was all along. With the aid of skillful photography and clever editing, Varda has crafted an enticing fable about sex, marriage, male egotism, and female enabling of it. Is the story tragic or comic? Is François a fool or a cad? Is Thérèse willfully blind? Is Émilie naive or wicked? How are we to take the film's ending, with its switch from summery to autumnal? There aren't many films that manage to be so satisfying and so tantalizing at the same time.

Watched on Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Dodsworth (William Wyler, 1936)

Walter Huston in Dodsworth

Sam Dodsworth: Walter Huston
Fran Dodsworth: Ruth Chatterton
Edith Cortright: Mary Astor
Arnold Iselin: Paul Lukas
Captain Lockert: David Niven
Kurt Von Obersdorf: Gregory Gaye
Baroness Von Obersdorf: Maria Ouspenskaya
Matey Pearson: Spring Byington
Tubby Pearson: Harlan Briggs
Renée de Penable: Odette Myrtil
Emily: Kathryn Marlowe
Harry: John Payne

Director: William Wyler
Screenplay: Sidney Howard
Based on the play adapted by Sidney Howard from a novel by Sinclair Lewis
Cinematography: Rudolph Maté
Art direction: Richard Day
Music: Alfred Newman
Costume design: Omar Kiam

I have a feeling that Dodsworth is not quite as well known as it ought to be. It's one of the few Hollywood dramas of the 1930s that seem to have been made for grownups, avoiding melodrama and sentimentality in its treatment of marriage and growing old, and sidestepping the Production Code's infantilizing attitudes toward adultery and divorce. And most of all, it has a wonderful performance by Walter Huston, who was nominated for an Oscar but lost, rather shamefully, to Paul Muni's hammy turn in The Story of Louis Pasteur (William Dieterle, 1936). Huston's Sam Dodsworth is a captain of industry, founder of an automobile company, who decides to sell the business and spend the rest of his life figuring out what to do with himself. His wife, Fran, knows exactly what she wants to do: Sail to Europe and flirt with all those interesting men who can't be found in the Midwestern city of Zenith -- which was also the setting for Sinclair Lewis's novel Babbitt, whose title character became a byword for Midwestern fatuousness. Fran is a few years younger than Sam -- Chatterton was 44, Huston 53 -- and unwilling to grow old gracefully, claiming to be 35 and unwilling to reveal that she has just become a grandmother. Opportunity presents itself immediately on shipboard in the form of a British military officer, but after flirting shamelessly with him, Fran takes fright when they reach England and he wants to take their relationship another step. But when the Dodsworths move on to Paris, Fran becomes bolder and after Sam, bored with life in Europe, returns alone to the United States for a visit with their daughter and her husband, she begins an affair with a suave European. Getting wind of the affair, Sam returns to Paris and confronts Fran, who breaks it off. But their efforts to patch things up fail and Fran asks him for a divorce. In Vienna she finds another suitor, a younger, rather effete aristocrat named Kurt Von Obersdorf, and is ready to marry him once the divorce goes through. Meanwhile, Sam travels on his own and in Naples is reunited with Edith Cortright, a divorcee he had met earlier. Sam moves in with Edith in the villa she is renting, but their happiness is interrupted by Fran's misery: Kurt's mother, the baroness, forbids their marriage on the grounds that Fran is not only divorced but also too old to provide an heir for the family line. A distraught Fran, facing up to failure, urges Sam to return to America with her, presenting him with the dilemma of continuing a marriage that has proved hopeless or exploring the new vistas that have opened for him. Lewis's novel is more in the satirical vein of Babbitt than the film version; Sidney Howard's screenplay, based on his Broadway play, which also starred Huston, evokes Henry James's stories about American encounters with Europeans. William Wyler, with his smooth, unobtrusive professionalism, is the perfect director for the film, which was made under the aegis of producer Samuel Goldwyn, who aimed for polish and prestige and for once achieved it. Given that Dodsworth was made in the mid-1930s, when Nazism was on the rise in Germany and fascism had taken hold in Italy, it seems a bit out of its time. Sam and Edith's dream of traveling the world together feels more than a little naive in the context of the period. The only reference to the rumblings of war perceptible in the film comes in Sam's comment that he prefers the United States because there are "no soldiers along the Canadian border."

Watched on Turner Classic Movies

That Obscure Object of Desire (Luis Buñuel, 1977)

Fernando Rey in That Obscure Object of Desire

Mathieu: Fernando Rey
Conchita: Carole Bouquet, Ángela Molina
Édouard: Julien Bertheau
Martin: André Weber
Encarnación (Conchita's mother): María Asquerino
The Psychologist: Piéral

Director: Luis Buñuel
Screenplay: Luis Buñuel in collaboration with Jean-Claude Carrière
Based on a novel by Pierre Louÿs
Cinematography: Edmond Richard
Production design: Pierre Guffroy
Fernando Rey's voice dubbed by Michel Piccoli

In my comments on Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour (1967) I expressed my attitude toward solving what some people think of as that film's riddles as "like concentrating on the threads at the expense of seeing the tapestry." And I'll stick with that. I'm not particularly interested in why Buñuel cast two actresses in the role of Conchita in That Obscure Object of Desire, or why Mathieu occasionally carries around a burlap sack, or even why the central story, of Mathieu's efforts to consummate his desire for Conchita, plays out against a background of terrorist attacks. I know that Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière toyed with the idea of multiple casting even before the film began with a single actress, Maria Schneider, in the role, and that Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina got the part after Buñuel had difficulties working with Schneider. I know, too, that the theory has been advanced that Conchita is a terrorist and that she finally sleeps with Mathieu after he agrees to become one, too -- hence the bomb that explodes at the end of the film. (A theory that reduces a masterwork to the level of hack thriller-filmmaking.) I'm sure that someone has come up with an explanation for the burlap sack, too, along with the fly in Mathieu's drink and the mouse caught in a trap and any other incidental detail that sticks in viewers' minds and can be fitted into an elaborately reductive network of symbolism. But my ultimate response to all of these enigmatic details is delight that they are there, that they popped up in Buñuel's mind as he made the film and that he could and did get away with them. They are what keeps me coming back to Buñuel's films with renewed interest and revived delight, viewing after viewing.

Watched on Filmstruck

Coffee and Cigarettes (Jim Jarmusch, 2003)

Cast: Roberto Benigni, Steven Wright, Joie Lee, Cinqué Lee, Steve Buscemi, Iggy Pop, Tom Waits, Joseph Rigano, Vinny Vella, Vinny Vella Jr., Renee French, E.J. Rodriguez, Alex Descas, Isaach De Bankolé, Cate Blanchett, Michael Hogan, Jack White, Meg White, Alfred Molina, Steve Coogan, Katy Hansz, The GZA, RZA, Bill Murray, William Rice, Taylor Mead

Director: Jim Jarmusch
Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch
Cinematography: Tom DiCillo, Frederick Elmes, Ellen Kuras, Robby Müller
Production design: Dan Bishop, Mark Friedberg, Tom Jarmusch

For Jarmusch fans only. Coffee and Cigarettes, a collection of 11 black-and-white short films in which people sit at tables and drink coffee and smoke cigarettes, began as semi-improvisatory shorts spun off from Jarmusch's features by their crew and cast members and friends. Starting with Roberto Benigni and Steven Wright essentially winging it in "Strange to Meet You," the collection evolved from a series of shaggy-dog sketches into more structured narratives with a few motifs echoing throughout. The most structured is certainly "Cousins," in which Cate Blanchett plays two roles: the soigné movie star Cate and her blowsier cousin Shelly, who resents Cate's privileged life. They meet in the coffee shop of a luxury hotel, where Cate patiently endures Shelly's sniping until she's called away for an interview. Shelly has been smoking throughout their conversation, but when she lights up after Cate leaves, a waiter tells her that smoking is forbidden there. The episode "Cousins?" is a parallel story in which Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan, two British actors trying to make it in the States, meet for coffee, during which Molina reveals to a very unimpressed Coogan that he has done genealogical research which proves they are distant relations. After an excited fan asks for his autograph, Coogan becomes more and more condescending toward Molina. Then Molina receives a call on his cell phone from Spike Jonze, instantly deflating Coogan's ego to the point that Molina leaves him to pay the check. Amusing as these vignettes are, they don't rise much beyond the level of anecdotes, and some of the other episodes, such as the ones in which Jack White demonstrates his Tesla coil or Renee French fends off a too-attentive waiter, fall flat. Still, if you don't expect too much, there's an evanescent charm to the whole project.

Watched on Showtime

Devi (Satyajit Ray, 1960)

Doyamoyee: Sharmila Tagore
Umaprasad: Soumitra Chatterjee
Kalikinkar Roy: Chhabi Biswas
Harasundari: Karuna Bannerjee
Taraprasad: Purnendu Mukherjee
Khoka: Arpan Chowdhury

Director: Satyajit Ray
Screenplay: Satyajit Ray
Based on a story by Prabhat Kumar Mukherjee
Cinematography: Subrata Mitra
Music: Ali Akbar Khan

The dialectic of tradition and change that informs so many of Satyajit Ray's films is uppermost in Devi, as is the director's ongoing portrayal of the role of women in Indian society. Doya is Uma's 17-year-old wife, enchantingly beautiful and touchingly naive. She wonders why Uma must leave her to go study in Calcutta -- he doesn't need the money, she says. Indeed, his family is rich, but Uma's desire to become something more than the son of the wealthy Kalikinkar is beyond Doya's limited experience. While he's away, Doya becomes a much-loved member of the household, to the point that her sister-in-law, Harasundari, feels jealous that Khoka, the son of Harasundari and Taraprasad, seems to love Doya more than his own mother. Doya's father-in-law, Kalikinkar, is so infatuated with her that one night he dreams that she is the incarnation of the goddess Kali, to whom his own name is a sign of his devotion. Kalikinkar proclaims his vision and sets up a special place in the house for Doya to be venerated. The girl is bewildered, but powerless to protest. A man who has heard of the incarnated goddess brings his seriously ill son, who has so far not benefited from medical treatment, to the house, praying for help, and when the boy recovers, Doya attracts crowds of the faithful. Alerted to what's going on, Uma returns home, but is unable to persuade the frightened Doya to go away with him. Then young Khoka falls ill and Kalikinkar insists that his parents send away the doctors and allow Doya alone to cure him. The boy dies, and Uma comes home again to find his wife destroyed by the experience. What is essentially a fable about misplaced faith gains immense strength and dignity from Ray's straightforward treatment, which emphasizes the increasing entrapment of Doya in a situation she can't control. Tagore's haunting performance and Biswas's portrayal of Kalikinkar's mad obsession are highlights of a still-provocative film. It became a cause célèbre in India after politicians decided it somehow insulted Hinduism, and only the intervention of Prime Minister Nehru allowed Devi to be shown abroad.

Watched on Filmstruck Criterion Channel

The Tarnished Angels (Douglas Sirk, 1958)

Rock Hudson and Dorothy Malone in The Tarnished Angels

Burke Devlin: Rock Hudson
Laverne Shumann: Dorothy Malone
Roger Shumann: Robert Stack
Jiggs: Jack Carson
Jack Shumann: Christopher Olsen
Matt Ord: Robert Middleton
Col. Fineman: Alan Reed
Sam Hagan: Alexander Lockwood

Director: Douglas Sirk
Screenplay: George Zuckerman
Based on a novel by William Faulkner
Cinematography: Irving Glassberg
Art direction: Alexander Golitzen, Alfred Sweeney
Music: Frank Skinner
Costume design: Bill Thomas

CinemaScope and black-and-white are an odd combination. The former was developed and premiered in 1953 as a way for exhibitors to give audiences something they couldn't find at home on their television sets, which were of course black-and-white. It was meant for color and spectacle, and hastened the making of films in color toward its now default status. But although Douglas Sirk was noted for his use of color, and although The Tarnished Angels has scenes that would have benefited from both color and the CinemaScope extra-wide screen, such as the Mardi Gras sequences and the airplane races, he chose to make the film in black-and-white. And it works: It imposes a kind of film noir chiaroscuro on the story, which could easily have devolved into yet another routine action melodrama. The Tarnished Angels was not well received by contemporary critics: Bosley Crowther in the New York Times called it "badly, cheaply written" and "abominably played." (It might be noted that Crowther wasn't paying too close attention to those abominable players: In his review he misidentifies Jack Carson as Jack Oakie.) Today, however, the film has benefited from the wholesale reevaluation of Sirk's oeuvre, and it feels like the work of a master, if one not always fully in control of his art. Sirk creates a shadowy milieu for the story of barnstorming pilots in the Depression, including the shabby interior of the apartment to which Devlin invites them. And there's a wonderfully creepy use of Mardi Gras masks as motifs. But is there any way to excuse the ridiculously fake and exploitative scene in which Dorothy Malone is forced to dangle from a parachute against a process screen while an unseen wind machine blows up her skirts? None, except to blame it on the insistence of producer Albert Zugsmith, who followed up this film with a series of exploitation flicks starring Mamie Van Doren, like High School Confidential (Jack Arnold, 1958) and Sex Kittens Go to College (Zugsmith, 1960). Otherwise, however, Sirk managed to steer clear of Zugsmith's bad taste. It's true that Rock Hudson is miscast as the alcoholic, chain-smoking Times-Picayne reporter Burke Devlin, a part that demands someone who can look less healthy and strapping than Hudson does. But in fact he gives one of his best performances, emphasizing Devlin's vulnerability. Sirk chose to use long takes in the scene in which Devlin delivers an impromptu eulogy to Roger Shumann in the newsroom, beginning drunkenly but gradually sobering as he warms to the topic. Hudson rises to the acting challenge beautifully. Malone doesn't allow the studio's determination to show off her legs to prevent her from also showing the weary, hard-bitten side of Laverne Shumann. Of the leads, I find Stack's performance the least satisfying: There's not enough ambiguity and conflict in Roger's decision to prostitute Laverne to Matt Ord so he can fly Ord's plane; as Stack plays him, Shumann just comes off as an irredeemably obsessive shit. The Tarnished Angels is based on Pylon, one of those William Faulkner novels I've never got around to reading, but Faulkner reportedly said it was his favorite among all the films that have been made from his works. That's not saying a lot, I fear: Faulkner has been sadly mishandled by filmmakers. But judging it purely as a study of characters enduring what life throws at them, a favorite Faulknerian theme, the film stands on its own.

Watched on Turner Classic Movies

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (Park Chan-wook, 2002)

Ha-kyun Shin and Doona Bae in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

Ryu: Ha-kyun Shin
Dong-jin Park: Hang-ko Song
Yeong-mi Cha: Doona Bae
Ryu's Sister: Ji-eun Lim
Yu-sun: Bo-bae Han

Director: Park Chan-wook*
Screenplay: Park Chan-wook, Jae-sun Lee, Jong-yong Lee, Mu-yeong Lee
Cinematography: Byeong-il Kim
Production design: Jung-hwa Choe

I watched Park Chan-wook's "vengeance trilogy" inside-out: first the middle film, Oldboy (2003), then the third, Lady Vengeance (2005), and finally the initial film in the series, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. The order doesn't really matter, because it has become clear to me that what Park has given us is not just, as some have suggested, an updated version of the Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedies like Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, and Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, but a vision of hell, especially if you adhere to the idea advanced by Sartre that hell is other people. Park has a way of populating his stories with nightmare figures that play no essential role in the plot, like the dudes in the next room who masturbate to the sound of Ryu's sister groaning in pain (which Ryu himself, being a deaf-mute, cannot hear), or the mysterious mentally and physically afflicted man who appears as Ryu is trying to cover his sister's body with stones and persists in trying to remove them until he's driven away, meanwhile distracting Ryu from the drowning Yu-sun. There's also the fired employee who stops Dong-jin Park's car and proceeds with a failed attempt at seppuku, heightening Dong-jin's feelings of guilt, perhaps, but not providing an essential element in the narrative. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is, I think, the least successful of the three films: It doesn't succeed in transcending the revenge motif the way Oldboy does with its echoes of Dostoevsky and Kafka, and it doesn't have the technical finesse of Lady Vengeance. Its chief virtue is, especially in comparison with Lady Vengeance, the relative straightforwardness of its narrative, with the added ambiguity of its title: Is Ryu or Dong-jin "Mr. Vengeance"? In fact, the film is less about vengeance than about guilt: Ryu's sister commits suicide because she feels guilty for the kidnapping of Yu-sun, and passes along the burden of guilt to her brother when Yu-sun dies, while Dong-jin is filled with remorse over the consequences of his business failure. Park Chan-wook's characters exist in a world where there's no escape from guilt and no hope for redemption. Hell is empty and all the devils are here.

*See footnote to Lady Vengeance

Watched on Filmstruck 

Star Trek Beyond (Justin Lin, 2016)

Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto in Star Trek Beyond

Captain James T. Kirk: Chris Pine
Commander Spock: Zachary Quinto
Dr. McCoy: Karl Urban
Lieutenant Uhura: Zoe Saldana
Montgomery Scott: Simon Pegg
Sulu: John Cho
Chekov: Anton Yelchin
Krall: Idris Elba
Jaylah: Sofia Boutella

Director: Justin Lin
Screenplay: Simon Pegg, Doug Jung
Cinematography: Stephen F. Windon
Production design: Andrew Murdock, Thomas E. Sanders
Music: Michael Giacchino
Costume design: Sanja Milkovic Hays

Writing a screenplay for a Star Trek reboot film must be something of a confining job. You have to provide a worthy adversary for the Enterprise crew, who eat worthy adversaries for lunch, so you need to create a role for an actor who doesn't mind hamming it up, like Eric Bana, Benedict Cumberbatch, or Idris Elba, and keep the role distinct from all the other villains who have threatened the Enterprise. You have to provide the requisite familiar shtick for the characters: Bones and Spock must squabble, but good naturedly; Bones has to say something like "I'm not a doctor, I'm a...." at least once; Scotty has to fuss about the limitations of his engines; Chekov has to have a charming occasion to pronounce his v's like w's, and so on. You also have to provide a few surprises about the characters: Spock and Uhura are a couple! Sulu's gay! You have to have a pretty female newcomer who can wear elaborate alien makeup but still look pretty. You have to set up the plot to accommodate spectacular special effects. So no wonder that each successive reboot movie feels a little overfamiliar, and that there are shortcuts in the narrative that don't bear close inspection. In Star Trek Beyond, for example, we leave Scotty hanging from a cliff by the fingertips of one hand, but not too much later he shows up alive and well with no explanation of how someone with the average musculature of a Simon Pegg hoisted himself over the edge. And no wonder that Star Trek Beyond went through heavy rewriting, with Pegg and Doug Jung taking over the script after a first draft by Roberto Orci, Patrick McKay, and John D. Payne was turned down by the producers. There are some touches of wit in the script, such as the opening sequence in which Kirk faces down a crowd of what appear to be fearsome monsters but turn out to be about the size of schnauzers, and a clever use of an antique boom box -- perhaps a nod to the one carried by the punk in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Leonard Nimoy, 1986), whom Spock incapacitated with a Vulcan nerve pinch -- as a lethally disorienting weapon against Krall's forces. The box booms out the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage," a track that would be several centuries old, and Bones asks Spock, "Is that classical music I'm hearing?" to which Spock replies, "Yes, doctor, I believe it is." The cast does its usual best, with Pine nicely suggesting some of the old Shatnerian swagger as Kirk without resorting to caricature, and Elba, for much of the film unrecognizable under the makeup, giving his villain real menacing weight. But in the end, the reboot itself has lost freshness. It's time to give the shtick a rest and to provide a threat to the crew that isn't so dependent on an actor going over the top. Perhaps it's time to come up with a science fiction plot that relies more on science than on fiction.

Watched on Hulu

All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955)

Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman in All That Heaven Allows

Cary Scott: Jane Wyman
Ron Kirby: Rock Hudson
Sara Warren: Agnes Moorehead
Kay Scott: Gloria Talbott
Ned Scott: William Reynolds
Harvey: Conrad Nagel
Mick Anderson: Charles Drake
Alida Anderson: Virginia Grey
Mona Plash: Jacqueline deWit
Howard Hoffer: Donald Curtis
Mary Ann: Merry Anders

Director: Douglas Sirk
Screenplay: Peg Fenwick
Based on a story by Edna L. Lee and Harry Lee
Cinematography: Russell Metty
Art direction: Alexander Golitzen, Eric Orbom
Music: Frank Skinner
Costume design: Bill Thomas

Pauline Kael called All That Heaven Allows "trashy," and others have called it "campy," but the ongoing reevaluation of the work of its director, Douglas Sirk, has delivered a new respect for the film, leading to, among other things, its selection in 1995 for inclusion in the Library of Congress's National Film Registry. Some would still call it a triumph of form over content, because no one today seriously questions Sirk's brilliant exploitation of the technical resources available to him, specifically his unusually expressive work, in collaboration with cinematographer Russell Metty, in Technicolor, a proprietary medium whose proprietors had rigidly fixed ideas about what could be done with it. Sirk called on Metty for, among other things, more shadows and more use of reflections than were conventional in Technicolor. See, for example, the near-silhouetted figures of Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman in the still above, with its subtle backlighting. And notice how the television set that's an unwelcome gift to Wyman's Cary Scott from her children is used in the scenes in which it appears: It's never turned on, but instead its blank screen reflects Cary's face, almost as if the set is a cage in which she's trapped. In another scene, it reflects the flames in the fireplace, becoming a little bit of hell. But that symbolic use of the TV set also suggests why we ought to take All That Heaven Allows more seriously for its content, as filmmakers like Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Todd Haynes have done by echoing it in their films. Because ATHA is the epitome of the "woman's picture" as ironic commentary on what women experienced in the 1950s. For all her masculine name, Cary undergoes a constant reminder of her vulnerability as a woman: She is nearly raped by the drunken Howard Hoffer. At or near 40 (Wyman was 38), she is thought by her children to be beyond remarrying for love or even sex: Hence their tolerance of a proposal from the asexual or possibly closeted Harvey, who admits he can't offer her much beyond "companionship." The television set is pushed on her by everyone who thinks it will provide relief from loneliness. The children only come round to something like acceptance of their mother's independence after she has broken off the engagement to the handsome, virile (and younger) Ron Kirby, and they have started new lives of their own: The daughter is getting married and the son is going off to work overseas. (In Iran! A reflection of different times.) No wonder Cary suffers psychosomatic headaches. I admit to having problems with the film's ending, in which she seemingly finds fulfillment only by devoting herself to nursing the now-vulnerable Ron back to health, as if a woman can only be useful by serving a man. But Sirk himself had problems with that ending, which was imposed on him by the producer, Ross Hunter. Sirk wanted more ambiguity about whether Ron would live or die. All That Heaven Allows was ignored by the Academy, though Metty's cinematography certainly deserved notice -- it was probably judged a little too unconventional by his peers -- as did Frank Skinner's score, with its effective use of quotations from Liszt and Brahms and its resistance to melodramatic overstatement.

Watched on Turner Classic Movies

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.