Late August, Early September (Olivier Assayas, 1998)

 

Cast: Mathieu Amalric, Virginie Ledoyen, François Cluzet, Jeanne Balibar, Alex Descas, Arsinée Khanjian, Mia Hansen-Løve, Nathalie Richard, Eric Elmosnino. Screenplay: Olivier Assayas. Cinematography: Denis Lenoir. Production design: François-Renaud Labarthe. Film editing: Luc Barnier. 

Late August, Early September is what you might call a “mood title” as opposed to a “content title.” It’s like the ones Yasujiro Ozu gave his films, such as Late Spring (1949) or Early Summer (1951), not so much about the time of the year as about the feelings those seasons or months evoke. Assayas’s film is about men and women who have reached that point in middle age at which it seems there’s no turning back, no starting a new path in life, but instead they must go on into their later years on the track where they’ve found themselves. The central character of the film is Gabriel (Mathieu Amalric), a writer/editor who at the start of the film is selling the apartment where he has lived with his girlfriend, Jenny (Jeanne Balibar). They have broken up fairly amicably and Gabriel has now started a relationship with another woman, Anne (Virginie Ledoyen), who is a little more impulsive and unsettled than Jenny. Gabriel is friends with Adrien (François Cluzet), a modestly successful novelist who is fretting about how modest that success has been. Adrien, too, has an ex, Lucie (Arsinée Khanjian), but he has now taken up with a 15-year-old girl, Véra (Mia Hansen-Løve), a relationship he has kept secret from his friends. Adrien is also suffering from an unnamed disease. The film explores the relationships among these characters, who talk and smoke and make love the way people in French films do – to the point where those of us who aren’t French may get a little impatient for the film to get on with a plot. But it’s so nicely acted by some very attractive performers that it didn’t wear me down, even though when it ended I wondered a little what point it was striving to make. 

Triple Frontier (J.C. Chandor, 2019)

 

Cast: Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Charlie Hunnam, Garrett Hedlund, Pedro Pascal, Adria Arjona. Screenplay: Mark Boal, J.C. Chandor. Cinematography: Roman Vasyanov. Production design: Greg Berry. Film editing: Ron Patane. Music: Disasterpeace. 

Mark Boal’s screenplay for Triple Frontier was kicked around for several years before it was finally made. Originally planned to be directed by Kathryn Bigelow, who directed Boal’s Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker and Oscar-nominated Zero Dark Thirty scripts, it was going to star Tom Hanks and Johnny Depp. When that fell through, other directors and other stars were talked about, including Channing Tatum, Mark Wahlberg, Will Smith, and Mahershala Ali. That it wound up starring Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Charlie Hunnam, Garrett Hedlund, and Pedro Pascal is a pretty good indication that filmmakers now have a solid roster of male actors to call on. All that cast shuffling and script massaging may have taken a little toll on the final product, which is a pretty good movie that doesn’t quite have the kinetic charge it needs. The story is about five veterans of the Special Forces who get together to assassinate a South American drug lord and steal the millions he has stashed away. The triple frontier of the title is the Tres Fronteras area where Brazil, Peru, and Colombia come together. The five men have all fallen on hard times after leaving the military. Affleck’s character, nicknamed “Redfly,” the former leader of the group, is trying to make a living selling real estate and struggling with a failed marriage. “Ironhead” (Hunnam) ekes out a living making motivational speeches to new recruits. His brother, Ben (Hedlund), gets a battering as a cage fighter. “Catfish” (Pascal) is a pilot whose license has been suspended because the plane he was hired to fly was loaded with cocaine. Only “Pope” (Isaac) still has military ties: He’s a hired gun for law enforcement organizations. With such varied backstories, the characters in Triple Frontier ought to be more involving, especially when their plan initially succeeds but then falls apart in a grueling attempt to haul the cash they scavenge across the Andes to their escape vessel. There are echoes of much better movies in this one, such as The Wages of Fear (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953) and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John Huston, 1948). But Triple Frontier, despite the hard work of its fine cast, seems muddled – and even, dare I say, muddied by the gloomycam cinematography.

La Chinoise (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)

 

Cast: Anne Wiazemsky, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Juliet Berto, Michel Semeniako, Lex DeBruijn, Omar Diop, Francis Jeanson, Blandine Jeanson, Eliane Giovagnoli. Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard. Cinematography: Raoul Coutard. Film editing: Delphine Desfons, Agnès Guillemot. Music: Michel Legrand, Karlheinz Stockhausen. 

Whenever I think the world has gone completely crazy, I think back to the late 1960s and realize that it may have been even crazier then. Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise is a helpful way of remembering that age. It might be worth putting together a double feature of Godard's film along with Haskell Wexler's 1969 film Medium Cool. Together, they bracket that annus horribilis 1968, the year of riots and assassinations. Godard's film is about what he called in his 1966 film Masculin Féminin “the Children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” a generation of French young people striving to make sense of a world they don't control. In that movie, which also starred Jean-Pierre Léaud, they find no ready outlet for their revolutionary energies. But by the time of La Chinoise they have discovered it in Maoism and the Cultural Revolution that began in 1966. The five or six young would-be revolutionaries of La Chinoise have come together to form a cell, in which they endlessly discuss the tenets of Marxist-Leninism and fetishize Mao's Little Red Book. It's a film that's alternately funny and scary, especially as the talk finally finds an outlet in action -- suicide and political assassination. It's also a film that will test the patience of anyone who wants to see things happen rather than listen to people talk about ideas that might make them happen. 

They Live (John Carpenter, 1988)

 Cast: Roddy Piper, Keith David, Meg Foster, George “Buck” Flower, Peter Jason, Raymond St. Jacques, Jason Robards III. Screenplay: John Carpenter, based on a story by Ray Nelson. Cinematography: Gary B. Kibbe. Art direction: William J. Durrell Jr., Daniel A. Lomino. Film editing: Gib Jaffe, Frank E. Jimenez. Music: John Carpenter, Alan Howarth. 

Roddy Piper never made the leap from the wrestling ring to action movies with the success of, say, The Rock or John Cena. He might have, if They Live had been a bigger hit initially, but after debuting at No. 1, it faded in popularity, partly because the critics tore it to pieces. Now, of course, it’s joined the ranks of cult movie favorites, and even the critics are willing to admit it was underrated at the time. Still, it’s easy to pick out Piper as one of its weaknesses. He delivers his lines, even the oft-quoted “I’m here to chew bubblegum and kick ass, and I’m all out of bubblegum”, as if he’s not quite sure why he’s saying them. And he doesn’t have the self-effacing wit that makes Cena and Dwayne Johnson such fun to watch. But there’s so much going on around Piper that it doesn’t really matter. A product of the Reagan era, or rather a reaction against it, They Live is an anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian fable that may be even more relevant today. In fact, artist Mitch O'Connell created a billboard with an image of Donald Trump as one of the film’s skull-faced aliens. They Live isn’t a completely satisfactory movie: The fight between the characters played by Piper and Keith David goes on way too long. Would anyone really suffer such punishment rather than put on a pair of sunglasses? The sci-fi element and the violence undercut the political message more than reinforcing it. But John Carpenter (who used a pseudonym as its screenwriter) brings the message home again at the end, including a sly dig at himself and fellow cult-movie legend George Romero.