Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas, 2008)

Jérémie Renier, Juliette Binoche, and Charles Berling in Summer Hours

Cast: Charles Berling, Juliette Bioche, Jérémie Renier, Edith Scob, Dominique Reymond, Valérie Bonneton, Isabelle Sadoyan, Kyle Eastwood, Alice de Lencquesaing, Emile Berling, Jean-Baptiste Malartre. Screenplay: Olivier Assayas. Cinematography: Eric Gautier. Art direction: Fanny Stauff.  Film editing: Luc Barnier.

Summer Hours sounds like the title of a film by Yasujiro Ozu, but the resemblance doesn't stop there. It has the melancholy tinged with humor of that master's films, and like his Tokyo Story (1953), it begins with a family gathering and the subsequent death of the matriarch. But it takes place in another country half a century later, and milieu is almost everything. Now we are in France, and the characters it centers on, the siblings Frédéric (Charles Berling), Adrienne (Juliette Binoche), and Jérémie (Jérémie Renier), are caught up in the global economy, with all that implies about letting go of the past, of pulling up roots. The Marly siblings, their spouses and children, and their mother, Hélène Berthier (who took her maiden name back after the death of her husband), are apparently content with their lives, but happy families are really not all alike. Olivier Assayas's story centers on a legacy, the stuff of 19th-century novels and murder mysteries as recent as Knives Out (Rian Johnson, 2019). But Assayas never lets his film sink into melodrama or the flamboyant acting out of squabbling heirs. It's about mature people facing the inevitable. Hélène (Edith Scob) has inherited the house owned by her uncle, a famous artist, which is filled with valuable works of art, though it is rather run down and very much lived in. The decorative panels by Redon are marred by damp, a broken plaster statuette by Degas is shoved into a cabinet -- itself a work of art -- in a plastic shopping bag, the art nouveau desk is cluttered with papers, and a couple of Corots hang casually in a hallway. When the family gathers there to celebrate Hélène's 75th birthday, she pulls the oldest, Frédéric, aside to give him some instructions about what to do with things when she's gone. This invariably awkward discussion is handled by Assayas and the actors with truth and finesse. Soon, sure enough, Hélène is dead, and the rest of the film is about the family coming to terms with the consequences of a legacy all of them treasure but none of them really has room for in their lives. It might be classified as a character study rather than a drama, but Assayas and company build such intimacy with the characters that we can feel the drama as intensely as if it dealt with matters of great moment and urgency.

Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007)

James McAvoy and Keira Knightley in Atonement

Cast: Keira Knightley, James McAvoy, Saoirse Ronan, Romola Garai, Benedict Cumberbatch, Vanessa Redgrave, Juno Temple, Brenda Blethyn, Harriet Walter, Jérémie Renier, Alfie Allen, Patrick Kennedy, Daniel Mays, Nonso Anozie, Gina McKee. Screenplay: Christopher Hampton, based on a novel by Ian McEwan. Cinematography: Seamus McGarvey. Production design: Sarah Greenwood. Film editing: Paul Tothill. Music: Dario Marianelli.

Atonement -- and I'm speaking here of Joe Wright's film and not the novel by Ian McEwan on which it's based -- tries to have it both ways: It provides both a happy ending in keeping with the lush, romantic production and a bleak surprise ending perhaps truer to the epic wartime sequence that interrupts the romance. But by doing so it demonstrates that what may work on the page as a provocative fable doesn't entirely work on screen. Both film and book ask a key moral and aesthetic question: Can art provide both truth and justice? Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan as a child, Romola Garai as a young woman, Vanessa Redgrave in old age) seeks redemption for a lie, but in the end she thinks she has achieved it by lying again, by writing a work of autobiographical fiction that is untrue to what actually happened. That moral conundrum comes as a kind of surprise at the very end of Wright's film, but it's anticipated on every page of McEwan's novel, a trick that can only be pulled in literature, where the unreliable narrator is a familiar device. There's a problem, too, in visualizing McEwan's story, where both the opulent country-house setting and the portrayal of the Dunkirk retreat, with its celebrated long traveling shot, tend to overwhelm the narrative and the depiction of the characters of Briony, Cecilia (Keira Knightley), and Robbie (James McAvoy). The actors, fine as they are, keep getting upstaged by the images. It's what it was called at the time, an "Oscar-bait" movie, and it won for Dario Marianelli's score, and picked up nominations for best picture, for Christopher Hampton's screenplay, Ronan's supporting performance, for Seamus McGarvey's cinematography, and for art direction and costumes.

Rendez-vous (André Téchiné, 1985)

Lambert Wilson and Juliette Binoche in Rendez-vous

Cast: Lambert Wilson, Juliette Binoche, Wadeck Stanczak, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Dominique Lavanant, Jean-Louis Vitrac, Jacques Nolot, Anne Wiazemsky, Olimpia Carlisi, Caroline Faro. Screenplay: André Téchiné, Olivier Assayas. Cinematography: Renato Berta. Production design: Jean-Pierre Kohut-Svelko. Film editing: Martine Giordano. Music: Philippe Sarde.

The volatile, nigh unpredictable behavior of the characters in Rendez-vous keeps the viewer off balance, which is not unexpected from its screenwriters, two major French writer-directors, André Téchiné and Olivier Assayas, who delight in making their characters walk on a moral tightrope. At one point, the story looks like a familiar pattern, a love triangle involving Nina, an aspiring actress (Juliette Binoche); Paulot, a naively infatuated young man (Wadeck Stanczak); and Quentin, a swaggerer who at some moments brandishes a razor (Lambert Wilson). But things keep taking odd turns: Quentin dies in what could be an accident but is possibly a suicide, and then returns as a ghost, or at least a figment of Nina's imagination. Enter, too, Scrutzler, a theater director (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who wants to put on a production of Romeo and Juliet, and casts Nina, who really isn't very good, against the objections of the producers, only to reveal that he had in mind Quentin for Romeo -- for rather perverse reasons. Meanwhile, Paulot, who works as a real estate agent, pursues Nina, only to reject her after finally succeeding in having sex with her -- a bliss in proof and proved, a very woe. It's all very well-acted -- this was Binoche's first major film role -- but there's something unfocused about the story, as if the writers were making it up as they went along instead of having a clear goal in mind.

Inside Daisy Clover (Robert Mulligan, 1965)

Natalie Wood and Robert Redford in Inside Daisy Clover

Cast: Natalie Wood, Christopher Plummer, Robert Redford, Ruth Gordon, Roddy McDowall, Katharine Bard, Peter Helm, Betty Harford, John Hale, Harold Gould, Ottola Nesmith, Edna Holland. Screenplay: Gavin Lambert, based on his novel. Cinematography: Charles Lang. Production design: Robert Clatworthy. Film editing: Aaron Stell. Music: André Previn.

As a satire on Hollywood and the star system, Inside Daisy Clover occasionally feels slack and uncertain. That may be because it was adapted by Gavin Lambert from his own novel, and authors are sometimes not the best judges of which parts of their books to transfer to film. There seem to be characters in the movie who haven't been given as much to do as their prominence suggests, such as Daisy's sister Gloria (Betty Harford), or Baines (Roddy McDowall), the assistant to the studio head, a role more generously cast than the function of the character in the story deserves. But I think a major problem stems from when the movie was made: in the mid-1960s, when the Production Code was on its last legs, and before films like Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969) and Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969) showed filmmakers what they could get away with. So although Inside Daisy Clover shook free of the Code's strictures against homosexuality and let Robert Redford's character, Wade Lewis, be revealed as gay (or, in a departure from the book, bisexual), you can still feel that people in the film aren't using the kind of verboten language that they would have in real life. Once, for example, Daisy (Natalie Wood) says "damn" and is reproved by her mother (Ruth Gordon) for using "those four letter words." When Daisy scrawls in anger on a wall, you expect stronger language than her graffiti contains. Lambert and director Robert Mulligan are chafing at the restrictions but haven't been given the go-ahead to take the film as far as it wants to go, so there's a kind of tonal dithering -- lunges in the direction of black comedy, as in Daisy's suicide attempt, that fall short of the mark.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019)

Adèle Haenel and Noémie Merlant in Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Cast: Noémie Merlant, Adèle Haenel, Luàna Bajrami, Valeria Golino, Christel Baras, Armande Boulanger, Guy Delamarche, Clément Bouyssou. Screenplay: Céline Sciamma. Cinematography: Claire Mathon. Production design: Thomas Grézaud. Film editing: Julien Lacheray. Music: Jean-Baptiste de Laubier, Arthur Simonini.

It isn't just the title of Céline Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire that made me think of Henry James. It's the film's delicate and subtle treatment of a Jamesean theme, the intersection of consciousnesses, and the fact that Sciamma, as James did in some of his stories, uses an artist as a vehicle for developing the theme. I also found the film something of a revelation of Sciamma's great talent after watching two of her previous films, Water Lilies (2007) and Girlhood (2014). The contemporary setting of those films necessitated a kind of documentary realism that is set aside for Portrait of a Lady on Fire, with its 18th-century setting and more rigid moral codes serving as limitations on its characters, defining their roles and allowing us to confront their responses to the limitation with clarity. It's also fascinating, I think, to compare Sciamma's film with Abdellatif Kechiche's Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013), a film heavily defined by the male gaze, while Sciamma's view of the lesbian relationship of her characters, Marianne (Noémie Merlant) and Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), is an exploration of female "looking." There are extraordinary moments that perhaps only a woman might have imagined, or imaged, throughout the film: The abortion that takes place with the maid Sophie (Luàna Bajrami) lying across the bed while a baby plays with her face; the festival that seems to be made up mostly of women, at which Héloïse's dress catches fire; Marianne leaping from the boat to rescue her paints and canvases; Marianne propping a mirror against the nude Héloïse's mons veneris so she can sketch a self-portrait on page 28 (the page number will become significant later in the film) of Héloïse's copy of Ovid, where the story of Opheus and Eurydice is told. Reviewers of the film reached a little too often and too eagerly for the word "masterpiece," an epithet that can only be applied by time, but it's certainly an extraordinary film, made so by fine performances, and by Claire Mathon's cinematography and Dorothée Guiraud's costumes, which often evoke the paintings of Chardin.

Too Many Girls (George Abbott, 1940)

Hal Le Roy, Lucille Ball, Richard Carlson, Eddie Bracken, Desi Arnaz in Too Many Girls

Cast: Lucille Ball, Richard Carlson, Ann Miller, Eddie Bracken, Frances Langford, Desi Arnaz, Hal Le Roy, Libby Bennett, Harry Shannon, Douglas Walton, Chester Clute, Tiny Person, Ivy Scott, Byron Shores, Van Johnson. Screenplay: John Twist, based on a play by George Marion Jr. Cinematography: Frank Redman. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase, Carroll Clark. Film editing: William Hamilton. Songs: Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart.

When Desi met Lucy -- that's the most memorable thing about this silly college musical that was directed on stage by George Abbott, who brought over several members of the original cast when he was hired to make the film version at RKO. It was designed to be a vehicle for Lucille Ball, an RKO contract player who hadn't been in the stage production and whose singing voice wasn't up to the demands of the Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart songs of the original show, so she was dubbed by Trudy Erwin. Among the cast hired out of the original were Eddie Bracken, Hal Le Roy, and Desi Arnaz, as well as a young chorus boy, Van Johnson, who has a couple of lines but goes uncredited. Although Arnaz is paired in most of the film with Ann Miller, he and Ball hit it off when they weren't on screen and married shortly after the movie wrapped. The story is nonsense about Connie Casey (Ball), a playgirl whose father wants her to settle down and go to college at his alma mater, Pottawatomie, in New Mexico. But he also hires some bodyguards, four young college football players, to keep her out of trouble. And so it goes, as the four bodyguards lead the Pottawatomie football team to a string of victories, and one of them, Clint Kelly (Richard Carlson), falls hard for Connie. It's very loose-jointed stuff, with some lively musical numbers spotlighting Arnaz, Miller, Frances Langford, and a large company of dancers directed by LeRoy Prinz, but a lot of dull filler in between. It's amusing to see Eddie Bracken before he got stereotyped as a doofus in Preston Sturges movies, and a crewcut Richard Carlson before he wound up as the very square star of such 1950s sci-fi movies as It Came From Outer Space (Jack Arnold, 1953) and Creature From the Black Lagoon (Arnold, 1954). 

Red Road (Andrea Arnold, 2006)

Kate Dickie, Natalie Press, and Martin Compston in Red Road

Cast: Kate Dickie, Tony Curran, Martin Compston, Natalie Press, Paul Higgins, Andrew Armour, Carolyn Calder, John Comerford, Jessica Angus, Martin McCardle, Martin O'Neill, Cora Bisset. Screenplay: Andrea Arnold. Cinematography: Robbie Ryan. Production design: Helen Scott. Film editing: Nicolas Chaudeurge. Music: Glenn Gregory.

Andrea Arnold's Red Road walks the fine line (not always steadily) between psychological drama and melodrama, between hard-nosed realism and sentiment. At its best, it takes us somewhere we haven't been (and probably didn't want to go), the Glasgow housing project of the film's title, and immerses us in some desperate lives. It uses the hand-held camera technique associated with the Dogme 95 moment splendidly, so that we stay off-balance physically as well as emotionally throughout the film. At its worst, a rather perfunctory sort-of-happy ending, it feels like an unconvincing attempt to wipe away the film's grit. It's a story about Jackie (Kate Dickie), a young woman who works as a professional voyeur, spending her days watching a bank of video monitors that record the goings-on in a particular slice of Glasgow. When she spots malfeasance, she can alert the police. But mostly she's watching people going about mundane tasks in decidedly unlovely places, so small wonder that her attention wanders and she fixates on individual people, such as a man walking his aging English bulldog. And eventually she lights on someone she knows: His name is Clyde (Tony Curran), and she has reason to become obsessed with him, because of something that happened in the past. Arnold lets us piece together the story as the film goes on, and she does so skillfully. It was Arnold's first feature -- she had previously won an Oscar for best live-action short with Wasp (2003) -- and it earned her much praise, including the Jury Prize at Cannes. Whatever its faults,  it repays your attention, not to say your endurance of some of its uglier moments.

Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019)

Joaquin Phoenix in Joker

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy, Brett Cullen, Shea Whigham, Bill Camp, Glenn Fleshler, Leigh Gill, Josh Pais, Rocco Luna, Marc Maron, Sondra James, Murphy Guyer, Douglas Hodge, Dante Pereira-Olson, Sharon Washington, Brian Tyree Henry. Screenplay: Todd Phillips, Scott Silver. Cinematography: Lawrence Sher. Production design: Mark Friedberg. Film editing: Jeff Groth. Music: Hildur Guðnadóttir.

Todd Phillips's Joker is an unpleasant and occasionally clumsily made movie held together by Joaquin Phoenix's Oscar-winning characterization of the psychotic Arthur Fleck, who becomes at least one of the avatars of the Batman comics character called the Joker. But whatever its defects, Joker also seems to be very much of the moment -- the moment of post-Covid-19 civil unrest and societal divisions, abetted by corrupt and ineffective leadership. It's an ugly film about ugly attitudes, and although it strives to build a psychological explanation for Arthur Fleck's transformation into murderous, anarchic loner, the explanation is pat and clichéd. Phoenix is a great film actor, but to my mind he's much better in movies that call for humanity rather than monstrosity, like Spike Jonze's Her (2013) or James Gray's underrated We Own the Night (2007). Arthur Fleck is an Oscar-milking role, with grotesque body transformation and a plethora of overstated moments. Phillips's film calls for none of the dark humor that Heath Ledger gave his Joker in The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008) or the entertaining flamboyance of Jack Nicholson's version of the character in Tim Burton's Batman (1989). Philips has modeled Arthur Fleck in part on two characters from Martin Scorsese's movies, Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976) and Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy (1982), and cheekily cast the man who played both, Robert De Niro, in his film. De Niro gives Phoenix someone his equal to play against, but echoing better movies is never a good idea. Zazie Beetz, a fine actress, is wasted in her role as the neighbor on whom Arthur develops an unsavory attraction, and Phillips muddles the revelation that their scenes together are mostly in Arthur's imagination. The denouement of the film is predictably cataclysmic, but Phillips flubs his ending scene of Arthur confined to the Arkham mental hospital by suggesting rather confusingly that he escapes -- presumably to set up a sequel -- and following it with Frank Sinatra's version of Steven Sondheim's "Send in the Clowns," a wistful song meant to be ironic in this context but really only thuddingly obvious, like much of the rest of the film.

Water Lilies (Céline Sciamma, 2007)

Adèle Haenel and Pauline Acquart in Water Lilies

Cast: Pauline Acquart, Louise Blachère, Adèle Haenel, Warren Jacquin, Christel Baras, Marie Gili-Pierre, Alice de Lencquesaing, Claire Pierrat, Barbara Renard, Esther Sironneau, Jérémie Steib, Yvonne Villemaire, Christophe Vandevelde. Screenplay: Céline Sciamma. Cinematography: Crystel Fournier. Production design: Gwendel Bescond. Film editing: Julien Lacheray. Music: Jean-Baptiste de Laubier.

I admit to a certain queasiness about watching Water Lilies, with its almost too intimate exploration of the lives of teenage girls, including some nudity. Céline Sciamma of course wants us to feel that way, to make us aware of these adolescent bodies as well as the souls that inhabit them. One girl, Marie (Pauline Acquart), is skinny and awkward; another, Anne (Louise Blachère), is on the verge of being overweight; and the third, Florine (Adèle Haenel), is flat-out beautiful. All of them spend much of their time at the swimming pool, where Florine is the star of a group of synchronized swimmers, and Anne coaches a group of beginners. Marie is the hanger-on who watches the other girls with a too-eager eye. At the film's start, she and Anne are close, but as Marie becomes involved with Florine, the two drift apart. There is a pivotal boy in the ensemble, the handsome François (Warren Jacquin), whom Anne desires -- at one point she she sees him looking at her naked in the locker room; she doesn't cover up in embarrassment but is rather pleased, and begins to try to win him. But François is after Florine, who strikes a deal with Marie: She'll let Marie watch the group practicing if she'll help her sneak out of the house at night to meet with François. Eventually, a different relationship develops between Marie and Florine. Sciamma choreographs this pas de quatre well, but there's something a little too formulaic and voyeuristic about the film, which doesn't resolve itself into significance. Still, its portrait of the sexual confusion of adolescence is often achingly real.

Pain and Glory (Pedro Almodóvar, 2019)

Antonio Banderas in Pain and Glory

Cast: Antonio Banderas, Asier Etxeandia, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Nora Navas, Julieta Serrano, César Vicente, Asier Flores, Penélope Cruz, Cecilia Roth, Susi Sánchez, Raúl Arévalo, Pedro Casablanc. Screenplay: Pedro Almodóvar. Cinematography: José Luis Alcaine. Production design: Antxón Gómez. Film editing: Teresa Font. Music: Alberto Iglesias.

Film puts us in an eternal now, letting us see people and places out of time. One moment we may be watching the handsome young Antonio Banderas in Matador (Pedro Almodóvar, 1986) and the next the grizzled Banderas, on the cusp of 60, in Almodóvar's Pain and Glory. Which is one reason filmmakers are so obsessed with traveling through time, whether in the sci-fi mode or in the autobiographical one. Banderas has so often been identified with Almodóvar that it would be unthinkable for the director to make a movie about an aging director, struggling with the weight of time and guilt that has taken a toll on his body and his career, without casting Banderas in the role. Both director and star work through the pain to achieve a measure of glory in this film, one of the best in the oeuvre of either artist. The great achievement of Almodóvar in this film is to take a well-worn theme, the intersection of art and life, and make it fresh and revelatory. It's unmistakably an Almodóvar film, containing the vivid use of color we identify with his work -- and that of his production designer, Antxón Gómez -- as well as his frankness about his own sins and misdemeanors. But it's also a Banderas film, with that actor's sly undercutting of his personal beauty and charisma, seldom before so brilliantly employed, except in Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In (2011). It earned him an overdue Oscar nomination. The film ends with a witty surprise, which is not only a sly trick but also underscores its thematic content.