3 Women (Robert Altman, 1977) 2
On DVD at Sach’s apartment, with Lucía and Sach, on 30 March, 2007, at around 23:30.
This film definitely lost a little something on the small screen. Among other things, I found Willie’s drawings significantly less ominous and chilling than when I saw this at the Castro. Nevertheless, the film was as mysterious and unsettling as ever. How would I classify this film? It certainly carries conventions from certain genres (horror, in particular), but it also very much defies classification. Anyways, probably the most frightening thing in the film is Millie’s notion of good eating. That her cooking potatoes at the end of the film provides such stark contrast and is such an improvement over everything else she made or talked about over the course of the film says everything. And yet I have to wonder: are there people that have watched this film and thought nothing of it?
(**)
쉬리 (강제규, 1999) 3
Shiri (Kang Je-gyu, 1999)
On DVD at Sach’s apartment with Lucía and Sach on 27 March, 2007, at around 22:30.
I guess you have to know the context in which this film was made to really understand what all the fuss is. I certainly don’t—I haven’t really seen any Korean films from then, and in the mid-90s I had no clue what was going in Korean politics at the time. That said, it was an enjoyable action film, despite its more ridiculous elements (an explosive as powerful as a nuclear weapon that is indistinguishable from water and is set off by a combination of heat and a certain color temperature of light). It’s kind of nice how the marketing of the film so contrasted the actual content, particularly in regard to the female lead (she’s never dressed anything like the way she is on the posters and packaging I’ve seen).
()
La règle du jeu (Jean Renoir, 1939)
At the Castro Theatre, with Lucía, Adela, and Meghan, on 12 March, 2007, at 21:25.
This was my last film at the Castro Theatre before we move. I can’t really imagine a better sound film to see at the Castro, though it’s a shame the sound quality was so poor.
When I was in high school, my father mentioned a few times how much of an impression this film had made on him when he had first seen it (he was at UCLA at the time). The fact that it had made such an impression on him itself made an impression on me, and so I determined that I would watch the film. At that point, pretentious as I was, I determined that it was the best film I’d ever seen, though before long it shared that space with The Children of Paradise.
In college, I saw the film as part of the Intro to Film class that I was taking. In the lecture following the film, my professor began reading a passage from a book, detailing the significance of the class relations, the recurring references to the “rules of the game,” and constant reminder of the ways in which the lives of the upper class are really just ongoing performances (I don’t remember the details). At some point I raised my hand and asked something about how, given that Renoir had prefaced the film with some text indicating that it wasn’t intended as social commentary, wasn’t there some danger of over-interpreting the film? The professor then revealed that he had been reading from Renoir’s memoirs.
It is interesting to see how Renoir works in the themes of performance into the film. Everything is a performance. Octave prepares to conduct an imaginary orchestra, the house guests put on a series of amateur stage productions, people give dignified speeches, and people put up masks and façades at every encounter. Even the hunting is its own kind of performance, as they stand around shooting at pheasants and rabbits that are brought to them by the groundskeepers and their noise sticks. As the two main story threads reach the height of insanity—the servants running around with Schumacher brandishing a gun, and André wrestling with St. Aubin—Chesnaye tells one of his servants that the farce must be stopped, and the servant asks him: “which one?”
I’ve seen La règle du jeu a few times now and it’s a great film whatever way I think about it. While I have come to value this sort of film less over the years and films like Tokyo Story and A Woman Under the Influence more, I still find La règle du jeu infinitely rewatchable and it still gives me a great deal to think about. It is the absolute height of that kind of theatrical filmmaking.
(***)
George Washington (David Gordon Green, 2000)
On DVD at home with Lucía, started a long time ago and finished on 7 March, 2007, at 22:50.
What a bizarre film. Malick meets Neorealism meets low-budget American filmmaking. I can’t say I loved it, but it was interesting in a number of ways, and I’m very curious to see what Green’s subsequent films are like.
(*)
Das Leben der Anderen (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006) 1
The Lives of Others
On 35mm at the CineArts Empire, with Lucía and Ben, on 3 March, 2007, at 21:25.
This was basically a well-crafted Hollywood thriller, only it was a German production, and it was set in East Germany five years before the wall came down. It was assembled expertly enough that I was never bored, even if the film was basically a large package of predictable plot twists and clichés (you could pretty much tell the nature of each of the characters at a glance—the characters were, for the most part, like thin paper cutouts, each with a readily identifiable set of traits, excepting the three main characters, whose deviations from those traits were the basis for the film).
The film did cause me to wonder about life in East Germany, but I don’t feel like I necessary know anything more about that after watching the film. I do wonder how differently the subject matter might have been handled by a director that grew up in East Berlin.
(*)