Ethan_Ford Reviews

High Life (2018)

It begins superbly but falls into a black hole of mediocrity

[5/10 · 12 May 2019]

It looks fabulous.Production values seem very high and this must be the most expensive film Claire Denis has ever directed.The basic plot,however,concerning a spaceship consisting mostly of dangerous prisoners coerced into a suicidal mission to try to harvest the energy of a black hole,is at once preposterous and rather derivative of a bad sci-fi film. But this is the problem with the film.It references too many great sci-films without ever being as successful or original. The opening scenes featuring a hydroponic garden bring to mind "Silent Running," whilst the sex-deprived prisoners take refuge in a machine suspiciously like the orgasmatron from "Barbarella". The main point of reference ,however,seems to be "Solaris" with many swooning shots along deserted corridors where potential dangers lurk and the feeling of being constantly suspended between reality and hallucination. While Juliette Binoche,in a part perhaps intended for Isabelle Huppert,is good as the research scientist,the revelation of the film is the performance of Robert Pattinson who is mesmerising in the difficult part of one of the prisoners who has a young child and who carries the film before the other prisoners are introduced in flashback. If the film had been more like "Silent Running" or "Moon" and had concentrated solely on his plight it might have succeeded.As it is it becomes increasingly incoherent and pretentious.

Film socialisme (2010)

Surface glitter hides an empty interior

[6/10 · 9 October 2010]

It was eagerly awaited for years,the trailer which was the whole film in fast motion looked ravishing, and it seemed as if in this,perhaps his last film,Godard would deliver his final testament,a summation of all the themes which have run through his work for the last fifty years.From the beginning it looks absolutely stunning.In its high def cinematography the colours are gorgeous,the Mediterranean setting recalling that of Le Mépris ,but whereas the latter film was a profound meditation on European culture and civilisation,here the characters spout banal platitudes about politics or philosophy as the ship sails along past various cities; in the Spanish section there is a scene of a bullfight,in the Italian section a clip from a Rossellini film,it's that predictable.

In the final section the film switches to one of Godard's favourite subjects,the daily routine of a family with young children who run a petrol station and have for no apparent reason a pet llama.Here finally the film shows some kind of rapport with its characters but it is already too late.Yet despite its faults it still exhibits all the hallmarks of Godard's style,the brilliance of his framing and editing,the crucial way sound plays against image,but the feeling persists that perhaps he has no longer anything to say.

Frontier of the Dawn (2008)

Beautiful and surreal

[9/10 · 8 July 2009]

While it seemed to divide audiences at Cannes showing and has yet to find a wide release,Garrel's latest film is almost as good as anything he has done over the last forty years.Exquisitely photographed by William Lubtchansky,the regular cameraman of Rivette,it depicts a strangely deserted,almost spectral, Paris devoid of tourists and the constant hum of mobile phones.Louis Garrel plays François,a trendy photographer who starts an affair with an unstable married woman.Eventually she is confined to an asylum and commits suicide. After a period of time he has a relationship with a more conventional girl who becomes pregnant.He is accepted by her family and happiness seems to beckon but his obsessive love for the dead woman comes back to haunt him in a manner reminiscent of Cocteau.

There is little dialogue throughout,and like most of his previous work there is a purity of image which is reminiscent of the silent cinema.Unlike "Les amants réguliers",his previous film which was a reflection on the disillusionment of politics,this is more of a return to the subject of obsessional love which has haunted most of his oeuvre.

Alone on the Pacific (1963)

An epic odyssey

[9/10 · 14 March 2009]

The theme of stubborn individualism has always run through Ichikawa's work and it was not surprising that he wished to film this true story of an ordinary twenty-three year old who crossed the Pacific in a small yacht,a feat which no Japanese had ever accomplished.The hero is played by Yujiro Ishihara,a hugely popular star in youth movies who is utterly convincing in the role.It is the accumulation of small details which make the film so compellingly realistic:the daunting planning and purchase of items from three sets of screwdrivers to a meticulously controlled diet of canned foods,beer and water. He is subjected to all the ordeals which lone sailors speak of,namely,above all,the loneliness of each day,the sleep deprivation,the unforeseen accidents,and above all the vagaries of the weather,his small vessel unceasingly lashed by unforgiving storms,even the presence of a shark which almost catches him off guard having a swim. Throughout the film we see flashbacks to his rather humdrum existence working for his father and then for a travel agency,his bickering relationship with his father,his rejection of his mother's endless pleas for him to stay at home.It seems as if the typically conformist pressures exerted by the Japanese family have in part driven him to find relief in the open seas. And when the end of the voyage comes,it is one of the most perfect and beautifully filmed climaxes in modern film history.

In the City of Sylvia (2007)

Towards a new cinema?

[10/10 · 12 March 2009]

It is one of the most written about and blogged about films of the last few years.References abound,from Bresson to Hitchcock,Rohmer,Murnau,even Dante and Petrarch,but is it too slender to sustain such a formidable weight of cultural allusions? While it is undoubtedly true that it is reminiscent of many other films,there is something sufficiently fresh and different which makes it definitely stand out. The story could not be more simple.A dreamy looking young man waits alone in a café in Strasbourg scanning each female passer by in the hope that she may be Sylvia whom he met in the city six years ago.Eventually he sees someone who may be her and he begins to obsessively pursue her through a labyrinth of streets and alleyways.Yes, "Vertigo" is of course brought to mind and there is a wealth of allusions to the feminist theory of the controlling power of the male gaze.But there is more to it than that.The ditching of much narrative,characterisation and even dialogue give rise to a new form of cinema experience,a concentration on the purely sensuous aspect of cinema,an increased awareness of the power of everyday sights and sounds which cinema usually elides in favour of a forward thrusting narrative and a well-defined protagonist.

Out 1: Spectre (1972)

Brilliant but elusive

[9/10 · 4 March 2009]

Out One:Noli me tangere was always too long to get any type of commercial screening so it was edited down to this four hour version,not short by any means unless it is compared to the sprawling original.But this is not just a condensed version,it is rather a reorganisation,out of which another film emerges,clarifying certain points while obscuring others,shining a light on some characters while pointedly neglecting others.

While the long version takes several hours for the narrative to spring into life with the passing of the message to Colin/Jean-Pierre Léaud,here this pivotal event takes place within the first thirty minutes,and so the conspiracy begins.Now all of Rivette's favourite themes (the theatre,conspiracy,paranoia,all set in a Paris far from the usual tourist haunts) which were crystallised in his first film,"Paris nous apparteint" come into play.The very long and gruelling theatre rehearsals are necessarily curtailed and various sets of characters are introduced who are usually kept apart from each other but at various junctures like pawns on a diabolical chessboard they can suddenly interact.The literary influences are,clearly,Balzac's "Histoire de treize" and Lewis Carroll although the presence of Borges,a favourite author of Rivette,with his stories of conspiracy and parallel worlds,is also apparent.The end too is much more satisfactory,infinitely more spine-tingling than that of the long version.And when it is over we want nothing more than to relive the whole maddening experience again.

History Lessons (1972)

A film ahead of its time

[25 November 2008]

As usual the Straubs take as their starting point a literary text,this time Brecht's novel "The Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar" which they use to deconstruct the harsh reality of Roman history.The dialogue is spoken in lengthy monologues by a peasant,a writer,a banker and a lawyer speaking directly to the camera.These dialogues are interspersed with three very long tracking shots of a car driven by a young man through the streets of modern Rome,a device which anticipates Kiarostami's "Ten" by thirty years.These modern scenes set up the dialectic between past and present,between the economic and civil corruption of ancient Rome with the decadence of its modern counterpart.While the ancient buildings have decayed,the same political and economic dilemmas which Brecht's characters describe still thrive amidst the new vistas of Rome's gleaming office blocks and skyscrapers.

A Married Woman (1964)

Neglected Godard masterpiece

[9/10 · 22 October 2008]

One of Godard's least seen films of the sixties,yet one of his most interesting and mature works.At first viewing it seems to be a typically Gallic story of adultery as the married woman of the title,Charlotte (Macha Méril)is torn between her airline pilot husband and her lover,an actor.But in contrast to how Truffaut,for example,treats adultery in the contemporaneous "La Peau Douce",Godard uses it as a pretext to explore the consumer culture of the sixties.He investigates the role which the media plays in forming Charlotte's tastes and opinions,focusing on the endless stream of advertisements,record sleeves,films and magazines to which she is exposed every day and which informs her views on every subject from politics to fashion. Her frequently naked body is seen in close-up,fragmented,com modified like all the other fetishistic images seen throughout the film.

As usual with Godard there is a plethora of references to filmic and literary figures who have influenced his work.There are a series of cinéma vérité type interviews with the husband,their son and filmmaker Roger Leenhardt which break up the narrative flow in an acknowledgement to Brecht,who would be a key figure in Godard's development in the next decade,whilst Charlotte indulges in several soliloquies reminiscent of Molly Bloom in "Ulysses",one of his favourite books.Formed by this melding together of disparate elements and techniques,"Une femme marieé" brilliantly expresses what it must have felt for a young woman to be alive in the summer of 1964.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

Minimalist masterpiece

[14 October 2008]

It sounds a very forbidding film:over three hours of watching a woman do the repetitive household chores which are the norm for housewives in every part of the world. Of course in no Hollywood film would we ever see the lead character run a bath,peel potatoes or lay a table in real time:these are all actions which a commercial director would ruthlessly elide in favour of a powerful narrative,and yet this is never a boring film. Once the viewer becomes accustomed to the different pace and rhythm,there is something hypnotic and fascinating about the daily routines which Jeanne Dielman performs every day.

Narrative,however,has not been entirely banished from this film. There is something strange and unspoken in Jeanne's relationship with her son who comes home every day from college,eats the evening meal,studies, and then pulls out his bed from the wall. Jeanne's life too is shrouded in mystery. Her afternoon encounters with a series of mostly elderly male clients is presented in a straightforward manner totally at odds with the sexual titillation provided by,for example,"Belle de jour" where the camera followed closely Sévérine's sexual encounters. In this film the camera waits discreetly at the bedroom's door until the client takes his leave.

While it is a "feminist" film,a film which was directed by a woman,starring a woman and which had all female crew,it nevertheless has a meaning for men as well. And if you find this film boring,as some viewers do,then you must also find life boring.

Der Bräutigam, die Komödiantin und der Zuhälter (1968)

A classic short film

[10 October 2008]

This is a good example of how inventive the short film format may be;much is condensed into the twenty-three minute running time, making this film seem much longer than its duration would suggest.The film has its roots in a theatre production of a play by the Austrian playwright Ferdinand Bruckner which Straub had been asked to direct by a German theatre company.He considered the play too verbose and cut its length from several hours down to just ten minutes,and it is the production of this play which forms the centrepiece of the film. The film begins with a long,hypnotic tracking shot along a Munich street frequented by prostitutes.This short scene is followed by the ten minute play which stars a young Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Hanna Schygulla.The next two scenes seem to belong in a different film completely.They concern an actress and her black boyfriend whom her pimp is trying to kill before her wedding,hence the film's title.Eventually the narrative logic begins to make sense as the girl is a prostitute and her pimp was one of the characters featured in the play. While most directors would have needed several hours to make sense of this plot,Straub miraculously manges to make all the disparate elements play off against each other in an enthralling experimental work which may be one of his greatest achievements.

Duelle (1976)

A magical experience

[9/10 · 9 October 2008]

Just as "Céline et Julie vont en bateau" owed a great deal to the American cinema of the fifties,so its follow-up "Duelle" pays homage to certain films of the forties,in particular the work of Jacques Tourneur whose work created the maximum of suspense and fear with the minimum of means.This slight,ghostly tale of two goddesses of the sun and the moon who are permitted to spend only forty days on earth per year has a strange,ethereal quality which recalls the ambiguity and hidden menace of "Cat People".The playing in the lead roles of Rivette regulars Bulle Ogier and Juliet Berto is mesmerising,whilst the settings in a race-track,run-down hotel,a deserted metro station and a dance hall have a seedy,haunted feeling,and while the story might seem rather opaque,Rivette has confirmed that in order to understand it fully it is necessary to read two French novels,"Le Carnaval" and "La Femme celte" which are unfortunately both out of print.

I Love You, I Love You (1968)

neglected Resnais masterpiece

[10/10 · 6 October 2008]

After the political theme of "La guerre est finie",Resnais returns to his familiar subject,time,in all its complexity in this film which is almost as opaque as "Marienbad" or as unsettling as "Muriel".Ridder {Claude Rich,an actor whom Resnais used many times over the years}is a publisher whose girlfriend is accidentally killed and who feels in some way responsible for her death.After listening to a recording by Thelonius Monk,he unsuccessfully attempts suicide after which he has a lengthy recuperation in a hospital .When he leaves,two doctors who have a constructed a time machine ask if he would like to participate in their experiments. Having nothing to lose,he readily agrees and enters the bizarre contraption along with a white mouse,although unlike the fly in Cronenberg's film there is thankfully no genetic mutation involved. He does not travel forward in time,however,but back ,precisely one year to a beach in Brittany.The experiment is supposed to last for a minute but something goes wrong and he is trapped in the machine.Now he experiences a host of memories brought sharply back to life,some important,others banal,in a kaleidoscope of sharply edited images which brings to mind the montages of "Muriel".The theme is reminiscent of many films from "La Jetée" to "The eternal sunshine of the spotless mind" and this rarely seen film is definitely one of the most important of Resnais' career.

The Truck (1977)

Minimalist road movie

[4 September 2008]

It divided the critics when it was shown at the Cannes Festival although it obtained the surprising endorsement of Pauline Kael.Duras' cinema usually is light in plot and incident but here she takes her usual style to an extreme of minimalism.In a dark room the woman(Duras) and the man (Depardieu)talk for about eighty minutes. The woman talks about the film which she would have made,a film about a woman who hitches a ride with a truck driver ,coincidentally perhaps a film not unlike the minimalist "Je tu il elle" by another feminist director Chantal Akerman. Spliced between these conversations are shots of a truck driving through endless Parisian suburbs,a landscape which has a certain bleak industrial beauty.It becomes clear that Duras is both the writer/director and the woman who is hitching the ride while Depardieu is both the actor and the truck driver and between the two settings, the interior of the script and the exterior where it would be played out a film,struggling to find expression,is born in the imagination of the receptive viewer.

Class Relations (1984)

Possibly their most accessible film

[10/10 · 17 February 2008]

Only a handful of directors have attempted to adapt Kafka to the screen:Welles with "The Trial" and Haneke with "The Castle" being the two most successful,but this adaptation of his unfinished novel "Amerika" is perhaps the best. "Amerika" was always Kafka's most approachable novel without many of the labyrinthine plots and tortured characters of the other novels and the Straubs certainly approach it with the utmost fidelity. It is the story of Karl Rosmann,a German youth who after getting a servant-girl into trouble is sent by his parents to find work in America.Like the novel,the film proceeds with a series of picaresque episodes recounting his travails first in staying with his wealthy uncle and then finding employment in a large opulent hotel. The Straubs' minimalist style of long takes combined with static camera-work is preserved but the habitually expressionless acting style of their usually non professional cast is here combined with a more declamatory,theatrical style of acting favoured by some of the more experienced members of the cast,notably Laura Betti,and unlike many of their more hermetic film,this can be enjoyed by audiences as a much more straightforward exercise in the pleasures of narrative film-making.

News from Home (1976)

one of the most important minimalist films

[2 December 2007]

Following the epic JEANNE DIELMAN Akerman has relocated from old Europe to the very heart of the new world,in other words New York City.She has also made a much shorter film and one without a star,in fact without any stars at all.The images of New York,its streets,subways and buildings ,lovingly shot by camera-person Babette Mangolte,act as counterpoint to the soundtrack,not just the monotonous sounds of everyday life but the sound of the director's voice reading the letters written to her by her mother in Belgium. Akerman left home when she was twenty without telling her parents and this film records the sights and sounds of the strange city she found herself in,her alienation reinforced by the news her mother related from a distant continent.At once a film about America,urban life,loneliness,the place of the spectator,the film is incredibly sensual,a mosaic of images,colours,sounds.

Aspern (1982)

excellent adaptation of henry James

[8/10 · 23 November 2007]

Although Henry James is considered a difficult novelist,a surprising number of his works have made it to the screen and this is the second adaptation of his celebrated novella "The Aspern Papers",the first version being a rather gloomy affair filmed in 1947 with Susan Hayward and Agnes Moorehead.This is altogether a much brighter,lighter affair set in a sun-drenched villa.The story concerns a shy,withdrawn woman(Bulle Ogier)who looks after her very elderly aunt(Alida Valli).She is approached by a scholar(Jean Sorel,best known for his role as Catherine Deneuve's husband in "Belle De Jour") who is anxious to get his hands on some poems written by a famous American poet who had an affair with the reclusive aunt years ago and who it is rumoured left them in her possession.

This basic situation mirrors the plots of many James' novels (Washington Square,The Wings of the dove)where a young good-looking but rather unscrupulous man tries to take advantage of a shy,insecure woman for personal or financial reasons and the film deals subtly with the turmoil of emotions this arouses in the niece.Argentinian director Eduardo DeGregorio has worked with Bulle Ogier before on several films he scripted for her regular director Jacques Rivette and he retains many of the latter's qualities of ambiguity and a pervading mystery.

Number Two (1975)

Godard's darkest film?

[8/10 · 17 November 2007]

This was Godard's first film after the Dziga Vertov collaborations of the late sixties and early seventies,and his last feature film for five years.It can be seen as poised uncertainly between the analytical agitprop of the Vertov period and the more accessible films of the eighties which were his return to commercial film making.Its radical innovation which is at once striking and deeply unsettling for the average viewer is his use of split screen for most of the running length. The film tells of a youngish couple who live a seemingly conventional family life with their two young children and his mother and father,but beneath the facade of normality there runs a relentless deconstruction of the sexual power play of married life,the boredom and frustration of the wife and the alienation of the husband trapped in an exploitative job.An extremely pessimistic and very difficult film to watch.

The Left-Handed Woman (1977)

one of the most neglected of seventies films

[9/10 · 16 November 2007]

Peter Handke was best known as a novelist,playwright and screenwriter of many of Wenders' early films(he went on to write "Wings of desire" nine years later)when he made this,his debut feature.Few novelists make the transition to director easily but this film is remarkably assured for a first effort.Edith Clever,the German actress who starred very memorably for Eric Rohmer as "The Marquise of O" plays the housewife who one day announces that she wants a divorce from her husband.No reasons or explanations are ever given;the viewer can only speculate about her state of mind as the film proceeds in a series of beautifully shot, reflective scenes photographed by Wenders' usual cameraman Robby Mueller.The static camera-work and long takes are reminiscent of Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu.