The Tit and the Moon (Bigas Luna, 1994)

Biel Duran in The Tit and the Moon

Cast: Biel Duran, Mathilda May, Gérard Darmon, Miguel Poveda, Abel Folk, Laura Mañá, Genis Sánchez, Xavier Massé, Victoria Lepori, Xus Estruch, Jane Harvey. Screenplay: Cuca Canals, Bigas Luna. Cinematography: José Luis Alcaine. Production design: Aimé Deudé. Film editing: Carmen Frías. Music: Nicola Piovani. 

As the title suggests, The Tit and the Moon is one of Bigas Luna's ribald skewerings of the Spanish male ego. But what sets it apart from Jamón, Jamón (1992) and Golden Balls (1993), its predecessors in Luna's "Iberian Trilogy," and what makes it somehow more shocking, is that the protagonist is a 9-year-old boy. Tete (Biel Duran) develops a breast fixation when his mother (Laura Mañá) gives birth to a baby brother. Watching her nurse the infant, Tete begins to long for a breast he can call his own, and wishes on the moon for it. So when Estrellita (Mathilda May), a beautiful, well-endowed Frenchwoman, arrives in his small Catalonian town, he thinks his wish has been fulfilled. But he has rivals for her attention, not only her husband, Maurice (Gérard Darmon), but also a local, Miguel (Miguel Poveda), whose flamenco love songs attract her attention. The rest is a fantasia, narrated from Tete's not always reliable point of view, involving human pyramids, farting, a waterbed, a pet frog, motorcycles, a bodybuilder called Stallone, and much else. It's not like any other coming of age movie, and not all of it works, but it holds your attention if only because you keep wondering what will happen next.  

EO (Jerzy Skolimowski, 2022)

Sandra Drzymalska in EO

Cast: Sandra Drzymalska, Tomasz Organek, Mateus Kosciukiewicz, Lorenzo Zurzolo, Isabelle Huppert, Lolita Chammah, Agata Sasinowska, Anna Rokita, Michal Przybyslawski, Gloria Iradukunda, Piotr Szaja. Screenplay: Ewa Piaskowska, Jerzy Skolimowski. Cinematography: Michal Dymek. Production design: Roberta Amodio, Miroslaw Koncewicz. Film editing: Agnieszka Glinska. Music: Pawel Mikyetin. 

"I don't know whether I'm stealing you or saving you," a character says to the titular donkey of Jerzy Skolimowski's EO, which pretty much sums up the moral conundrum of a film in which no good deed goes unpunished. The animal rights activists who succeed in shutting down the circus in which Eo has performed only leave the donkey adrift in a world strange to him. Kasandra (Sandra Drzymalska) thinks she's being kind to Eo when she seeks him out and visits him after the circus closes, but she only awakens his desire to follow her, which he does at his peril. The vet who heals him instead of euthanizing him after he's beaten nearly to death only postpones the inevitable. And Vito (Lorenzo Zurzolo), who is the one who either steals or saves him, leads the animal further astray in his odyssey. The film could be interpreted as an indictment of cruelty to animals, but the humans in it are perhaps even crueler to one another. As a fable, EO is tangled in ambiguities and tinged with nihilism, unlike the film to which it's an homage, Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), in which the donkey is a suffering saint. No one is redeemed by Eo's fate, so it's better to see it as an expression of Skolimowski's vision, tenuous and complex and unresolved as most visions are, full of images that haunt and tantalize. 

Anesthesia (Tim Blake Nelson, 2015)

Sam Waterston in Anesthesia

Cast: Sam Waterston, Corey Stoll, Tim Blake Nelson, Kristen Stewart, Gretchen Mol, Glenn Close, K. Todd Freeman, Michael Kenneth Williams,  Hannah Marks, Ben Konigsberg, Natasha Gregson Wagner, Jessica Hecnt, Scott Cohen, Gloria Reuben, Yul Vazquez, Richard Thomas, Annie Parisse, Lucas Hedges. Screenplay: Tim Blake Nelson. Cinematography: Christina Alexandra Voros. Production design: Tina Goldman. Film editing: Mako Kamitsuna. Music: Jeff Danna. 

As an actor, Sam Waterston radiates sincerity. So does Tim Blake Nelson's Anesthesia, which proves to be both its strength and its downfall. Waterston plays a Columbia philosophy professor who, in the evening after he has just announced his retirement to an adoring audience of students, is brutally attacked on the streets of New York City. Most of the film is a flashback to the events leading up to the attack, in which we see vignettes of the lives of his family and some others whose relationship to him and the assault gradually become apparent. It's a familiar technique for plotting and for giving depth to the central character, but there's a whiff of pretentiousness about it in Anesthesia. Waterston's character likes to quote Montaigne and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and the quotes are designed to resonate with the events of the film. Some characters, like Kristen Stewart's self-harming grad student, barely fit into the narrative except to underscore the film's musings about the meaning of existence. Anesthesia is an honorable attempt at a cinema of ideas, but it tends to suggest that phrase is an oxymoron.

Pedicab Driver (Sammo Hung, 1989)

Sammo Hung in Pedicab Driver

Cast: Sammo Hung, Max Mok Siu-chung, Lau Kar-leung, Nina Li Chi, Sun Yueh, Fennie Yuen Kit-Ying, Liu Chia-Liang, Billy Lau, Lung Chan, Hoi Mang, Cory Yuen, Manfred Wong. Screenplay: Barry Wong, Yuen Kai-Chi, Sammo Hung, Kin Lo. Cinematography: Leung Chi-Ming. Art direction: Chin Yiu-Hang. Film editing: Peter Cheung, Keung Chuen-Tak. Music: David Lautrec. 

Martial arts movies are like musicals: You don't watch them expecting plausibility. Just as people don't break into song and dance in the street in real life, they don't enter a room and start kicking and punching and somersaulting through the air. And as I learned from watching Sammo Hung's Pedicab Driver, which many admirers of martial arts films consider a masterpiece, you also don't watch them expecting consistency of tone. At one point the film is full of raunchy humor and fart jokes, at the next it's a romance, and then there's a duel using fluorescent light tubes as light sabers, and then it's a message movie about the desperation that drives women into prostitution, then there's a wedding followed by bloody deaths, followed by fights in which the villain gets what's coming to him, and finally a happy ending in which everyone seems to have forgotten how much pain they've been through. Which is all to say that I'm not the ideal audience for a movie like Pedicab Driver, just as many people are the wrong ones to watch, say, Singin' in the Rain (Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen, 1952), but I managed to accommodate myself to it. 

Fifi Martingale (Jacques Rozier, 2001)

Jean Lefebvre and Lydia Feld in Fifi Martingale

Cast: Jean Lefebvre, Lydia Feld, Mike Marshall, Yves Afonso, François Chattot, Jacques Petitjean, Luis Rego, Roger Trapp, Jacques François, Alexandra Stewart. Screenplay: Lydia Feld, Jacques Rozier. Cinematography: Jean Clavé, Stéphane Patti, Matthieu Poirot-Delpech, Jacques Rozier, Ramón F. Suárez, Bernard Tiphine. Production design: Nicole Karen, Jacques Rozier. Film editing: Laure Meynet, Jeanne Moutard, Jacques Rozier, Anne-Cécile Vergnaud. Music: Reinhardt Wagner. 

A martingale, as I learned from Jacques Rozier's film Fifi Martingale (and from looking it up afterward), is a betting strategy that involves doubling your wager each time, whether you win or lose. Rosier's movie wins some but loses more. It was never theatrically released, and it's easy to see why: It's a mess. That it's often an amusing mess doesn't excuse the fact that it looks like a bunch of talented people got together and decided to make a movie poking fun at theatrical types without much more in mind than that. The premise is that the author of a hit play has decided to rewrite the play in mid-run, and when one of his performers is injured, he signs as a replacement an actor who has a photographic memory. But on the night that the play is to resume its run, the actor suddenly loses his ability to remember his lines. That in itself would be enough to sustain a satirical farce, which is what Fifi Martingale seems to want to be. But Rozier and co-writer (and star) Lydia Feld have so many other things that they want to try out that the film keeps rambling off of the central premise, and does so for two hours -- Rozier was never one who believed that less is more. If you're someone who wants a movie to make sense, avoid this one. But if you're less demanding and possess a good deal of patience there are enough funny moments to justify your time. 

Golden Balls (Bigas Luna, 1993)

Maribel Verdú, Maria de Medeiros, and Javier Bardem in Golden Balls

Cast: Javier Bardem, Maria de Medeiros, Maribel Verdú, Elisa Tovati, Raquel Bianca, Alessandro Gassmann, Benicio Del Toro, Francesco Maria Dominedò, Albert Vidal, Ángel de Andrés López. Screenplay: Cuca Canals, Bigas Luna. Cinematography: José Luis Alcaine. Production design: Irene Montcada. Film editing: Carmen Frias. Music: Nicola Piovani. 

Maybe it's just my Trump Derangement Syndrome asserting itself, but I can't help noticing the resemblance of Benito González (Javier Bardem), Bigas Luna's protagonist in Golden Balls, to our current president. There's the swaggering machismo, the obsession with glitz ("Two Rolexes!"), and the dodgily financed real estate development designed for self-aggrandizement. The chief difference is that Benito gets to suffer at the end, which hasn't yet come for his real-life counterpart, and when it does I doubt that we'll see him sobbing as he rips a bidet from its moorings at Mar-a-Lago. Luna's film is a satiric tragicomedy about the rise and fall of Benito, whom Bardem plays with great flair, just enough to see why people might fall for his bullshit, and with just enough vulnerability that we can feel a slight twinge of sympathy when he falls victim to his own connivings. If it's not an entirely satisfactory movie, it's because Luna has too many ideas that he wants to jam into the film, including some touches of surrealism borrowed from Salvador Dalí that astonish more than they illuminate. But as a modern moral fable, one with continuing relevance, it succeeds. 

The Mouth Agape (Maurice Pialat, 1974)

Nathalie Baye, Monique Mélinand, and Philippe Léotard in The Mouth Agape

Cast: Nathalie Baye, Philippe Léotard, Hubert Deschamps, Monique Mélinand. Screenplay: Maurice Pialat. Cinematography: Néstor Almendros. Production design: Michel de Broin. Film editing: Bernard Dubois, Arlette Langmann. 

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's familiar list of the five stages of grief -- Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance -- omits one that's featured in Maurice Pialat's The Mouth Agape: Impatience. Granted, it's antecedent to the others, and is usually present mainly when the person takes a long time dying. But it's a very real stage in Pialat's film, voiced primarily by the dying woman's husband and then only with guilt and embarrassment, made more poignant by the fact that he has cheated on her throughout their life together. There's nothing particularly admirable about the family of the dying woman (Monique Mélinand). Her husband (Hubert Deschamps), who continually has a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, feels up a pretty young girl who comes in to buy a T-shirt from his shop while his wife is dying in a nearby room. Their son (Philippe Léotard) is also unfaithful to his wife (Nathalie Baye), who goes off on vacation while he's watching after his mother. And yet, although The Mouth Agape takes a cold-hearted look at dying, treating it almost as an imposition on the living, the film somehow becomes more moving than the ones that sentimentalize the vigil at the bedside. The grief that the husband feels after her death is genuine, made more apparent by the way Pialat ends the film: first with a long tracking shot from the car carrying the son and daughter-in-law to Paris, where their lives will continue. We see the door that the father has just closed and then the streets of the village and finally the road to the city, receding as if the couple is escaping the trauma of death. And then we cut to an interior shot of the father turning out the light, enveloping him in darkness and loneliness. 

Dutchman (Anthony Harvey, 1966)

Shirley Knight and Al Freeman Jr. in Dutchman

Cast: Shirley Knight, Al Freeman Jr. Screenplay: Amiri Baraka, based on his play. Cinematography: Gerry Turpin. Art direction: Herbert Smith. Film editing: Anthony Harvey. Music: John Barry. 

Dutchman, Amiri Baraka's parable about race and sex, made it from stage to screen in admirable fashion. without the usual strained attempts to "open it up" with extraneous scenes. Granted, it comes in at just under an hour, too long for a short film and too short for a feature, but it's so tightly staged and so intensely acted that it doesn't need to be condensed or expanded. Shirley Knight's flamboyant performance in the role of Lula, the minidressed woman who comes on to an initially reserved Black man on the subway, her a best actress award at the Venice Film Festival, though some think she's overacting -- that her performance would have worked on the stage but is pitched too high for the camera. I see the point, but the role is a necessary foil to Al Freeman Jr.'s contained and wary Clay, who has to wait for her to pull the trigger that makes him explode, which he does superbly. It's the type of play and film that from title to denouement demands exegesis, but I leave that to others.   

Ma Mère (Christophe Honoré, 2004)

Isabelle Huppert and Louis Garrel in Ma Mère

Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Louis Garrel, Emma de Caunes, Joana Preiss, Jean-Baptiste Montagut, Dominique Reymond, Olivier Rabourdin, Philippe Duclos. Screenplay: Christophe Honoré, based on a novel by Georges Bataille. Cinematography: Hélène Louvart. Production design: Laurent Allaire. Film editing: Chantal Hymans. 

Sex without taboos is like tennis without a net. That seems to be one message of Christophe Honoré's Ma Mêre, which is so drenched in depictions of sexual activity that it earned an NC-17 rating in the U.S. Unfortunately, it's also boring. Featuring everything from public copulation to incest, with actors of the first order, it trudges from one shocking moment to another without ever engaging the audience's sympathy or interest. Isabelle Huppert plays the mother, who confesses to her son (Louis Garrel) after his father's death that she's a slut -- her word, or the French equivalent for it. He volunteers to be tutored by her in sexual freedom, though he's still manifesting elements of his Catholic schooling, a detail that feels like it's meant to make some symbolic point but doesn't. To aid in his education she enlists her friend and lover Réa (Joana Preiss) and a young woman, Hansi (Emma de Caunes). Sure enough, everything gets out of hand and la petite mort is succeeded by actual death. If these were characters we might potentially feel some sympathy for, the film could have made an impact, but my only reaction was relief when it was over. 

Moving (Shinji Somai, 1993)

Tomoko Tabata in Moving

Cast: Tomoko Tabata, Junko Sakarada, Kiichi Nakai, Mariko Sudo, Taro Tanaka, Ippei Shigeyama, Nagiko Tono. Screenplay: Satoshi Okonogi, Satoko Okudera, based on a novel by Hiko Tanaka. Cinematography: Toyomichi Kurita. Art direction: Shigenori Shimoishizaka. Film editing: Yoshiyuki Okuhara. Music: Shigeaki Saegusa. 

The engine that drives Shinji Somai's Moving is the voracious ego of a child. When we first meet Renko (Tomoko Tabata), she is sitting at the appropriately wedge-shaped dining table in the home of her parents, Kenichi (Kiichii Nakai) and Nazuna (Junko Sakarada). Everyone at the table is pretending that it's a perfectly normal meal, except that it is the last one that Kenichi will be having there. He's moving out, having joined with Nazuna in a decision that their marriage is virtually over. Renko is feigning a maturity and understanding that we will soon see is beyond the capacity of her 12-year-old self. Soon, under the pressure from schoolmates and her mother's attempt to impose a new order on their lives, she will begin acting out in a variety of ways. Somai's portrait of the effect of divorce on Renko is an acute and sensitive one, hindered as a drama by the fact that there are only two ways the story can go: reconciliation or acceptance. After the explosion of several attempts at reconciliation, that ceases to be an option. Somai chooses to dramatize Renko's process of acceptance with an extended sequence that's part real, part dream. It takes place at a festival at which Renko has arranged for both of her parents to be present, but when she's unable to effect a reunion, she runs away and spends the night alone, wandering the woods on the fringe of the festival and having a vision that somehow brings her to understand her inability to manipulate her parents' lives. It's a heartfelt movie with superb performances, though it seems to me to cheat a little with its shift into fantasy as a correlative for the psychological healing that takes place in Renko.