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.
(*)
엽기적인 그녀 (곽재용, 2001) 1
My Sassy Girl (Kwak Jae-yong, 2001)
At home on DVD with Lucía, on 1 March, 2007.
This was an entertaining film. The plot was all over the place and the story as a whole was a little weak, but many of the scenes were so nicely done that it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience overall. Of particular note is Jun Ji-hyun’s ability to contort her face. Every time she says “wanna die?” (or whatever it is that the translator chose to subtitle as “wanna die?”), she contorts her face in the most profound fashion.
Most of the film feels like an American high school film, particularly in the way that the characters relate to each other and the world around them in their still-formless lives (in the film, they are in college, in their twenties).
(*)
Surviving Desire (Hal Hartley, 1991) 2
At home on DVD with Lucía on 19 February, 2007, at around 22:30.
I’m not quite sure what I was supposed to get out of this film. The dialogue was very artificial in a self-conscious sort of way, almost poetic (I dislike poetry), like some kind of experimental theater. It did lend the film an interesting rhythm, but I found myself struggling with the film and laughing at it at the same time. One thing that can be definitely said is that the film is a good length—the world needs more 60-minute films.
Perhaps if I come back to it after watching a few more of Hal Hartley’s films (previously I’d only seen Henry Fool), I’ll find it more interesting.
(*)
Belated update 1
I haven’t posted in a while. Partly because I’ve been so busy, partly because I was waiting to move this blog to one running on Mephisto (as well as setting up a new blog for the robot6 crowd to post their technical advice and anecdotes), and partly because… I’m lazy.
I have no idea what my life will be like in two months. It’s a bit of a frightening concept, even if I have confidence that I will land on my feet and gain a lot of experience in the process (and hopefully fluency in Japanese). I have never had so little an idea of what’s coming ahead. Even when I went to college, I had some loose ideas about what it would be like (half of which were wrong), and I had visited the campus and some of its students and teachers some three months prior to moving in.
Since I last posted that I had seen White Chicks, Lucía and I went to New York for 8 days and 10 nights to visit my relatives and friends, and we purchased our tickets to Narita. We’ve seen Little Miss Sunshine (cute, but they killed my favorite character halfway into the film) and Absence of Malice on DVD with my brother, Blood Work on television, and Letters from Iwo Jima and Children of Men in the theater. Also, I finally saw It’s a Wonderful Life (on DVD with Lucía), and we’ve seen The Yes Men (which was the most disappointing thing I’ve seen in a very long time—a fascinating subject that was turned into the most tedious vanity piece imaginable).
Of these, only Letters from Iwo Jima stood out in any way. I don’t think I’ve ever seen another film quite like it. It had its fair share of clichés, and took a few easy punches at Japanese nationalists, but it managed to do a remarkable job of depicting doomed soldiers torn between a lack of desire to kill other people and the desire to make their short lives meaningful by taking out as many of the enemy as possible as they go down.
Children of Men felt very familiar. It had a style borrowed from a number of video games I’ve played (Half-Life 2, FEAR), as well as a number of classic films (Blade Runner, Escape from New York, Brazil), all of which is probably somewhat unavoidable given the subject matter. The story structure was very familiar as well: a disillusioned man has an incredible responsibility thrust on him by someone who knew him way back when; he is framed as a criminal in the media, making his return to normal life impossible; he finds he is surrounded by traitors and must escape and do the mission (almost) alone; he goes to a safehouse unknown to the outside world; it becomes unsafe; he places his trust in a man on the ‘other side’ (Sid); he goes into the most dangerous possible place so that he can get to the safest possible place; he reaches the safest possible place after being nearly killed or his mission lost several times. In more than a few ways, it was almost the same story as The Da Vinci Code and probably countless other films around the same idea of the disillusioned man saving humanity (though in the case of both of those films, the salvation of mankind comes in the form of a woman).
White Chicks (Keenen Ivory Wayans, 2004)
On DVD at home with Lucía, on 18 January, 2007, at around 20:00.
For some reason Netflix thought I wouldn’t like this film.
I’m not sure whether this qualifies as a remake of Some Like It Hot. It came close enough that I expected it to end with the same line.
I guess Netflix was right.
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L'Armée des ombres (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969) 2
Army of Shadows
on 35mm at the Roxie Cinema, with Lucía, Ben and Sunny on 14 January, 2007, at 21:00
Melville seems obsessed with details. He’s not much for plot-moving scenes, explicit violence, or dialogue; he’d much rather draw our attention to one thing happening on-screen, whether it’s Alain Delon fiddling with car keys in Le Samouraï or the careful execution of a robbery in Le Cercle rouge. Also, Melville likes us to imagine things off-screen, and I can’t think of a time I’ve seen this to such good effect as in L’Armée des ombres.
The real tone-setting moment for the film comes when Philippe Gerbier tells a fellow prisoner to escape while he distracts the guard. He goes over to bum a cigarette off the guard and the other prisoner runs, at which point Gerbier takes advantage of the guard’s distraction to stab him in the neck and escape through a side passage. As he exits the building, we hear some commotion of screen, presumably near the entrance, and it culminates in gunfire. Suddenly we become aware of two things: Gerbier is cruelly willing to sacrifice his anonymous fellow prisoner, and he is no ordinary prisoner (something that was hinted at but not made entirely clear before).
The film as a whole is very episodic. Relationships bounce around over presumed time gaps with little explanation, and the film really seems like a series of action vignettes out of a larger story that Melville doesn’t want to bog down the film in telling, or would simply prefer to tell through the vignettes. The film moves around in fits and jerks as though it were someone relating memorable incidents rather than a smooth narrative. What is the effect of this style of filmmaking? Well, it makes the film a lot more thought-provoking (we are often left figuring out why characters are doing what they are doing, and what happened before a scene to cause them to behave in such a way), and while I’m normally not over-fond of films-as-puzzles (such as Babel), I do make exceptions when I find the puzzles intriguing, or when I feel it contributes to my understanding of the characters (such as in Mulholland Drive, which I didn’t love, but I liked much more than Babel), rather than detracting from it. I prefer character-driven puzzles to plot-driven puzzles? Perhaps that’s it, but it sounds over-simplified and I’m sure I’ll find plenty of exceptions.
From these three films of his that I’ve now seen, I feel like Melville has a very consistent style. He must have been heavily influenced by Rififi (which Le Cercle rouge seems like an intentional nod to), which seems something like a point of origin for this kind of filmmaking where execution is the goal or focal point of the film and plot is given secondary standing—just prominent enough to give us some kind of reason to want to know the outcome of the events as they unfold. This was certainly the best Melville that I’ve seen, and I’m now all the more eager to see some of his other works.
(***)
Night at the Museum (Shawn Levy, 2006) 1
On IMAX with Lucía, Aman, and Ruchi, at the Metreon, on 06 January, 2007, at 23:30.
This film was entertaining enough, and that’s really all I asked of it. That’s all the good I can say about it, and anything bad I might have to say about it would seem pointless considering the fact that I never imagined that it was pretending to be in any way good.
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