MICHAEL ATKINSON

Kino pravda

MICHAEL ATKINSON — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:03:35 GMT

‘Envisioning Russia’ at the MFA
Because Mosfilm, the subject of the Museum of Fine Arts’ “Envisioning Russia” retrospective, was the Soviet state production studio, any cross-section of its history lays out the entirety of Soviet film history.

THE MIRROR: Tarkovsky’s film is a unique autobiographical testament.

Because Mosfilm, the subject of the Museum of Fine Arts’ “Envisioning Russia” retrospective, was the Soviet state production studio, any cross-section of its history lays out the entirety of Soviet film history — not only in its mainstream, but on its catapulting visionary fringes. Of course, Soviet filmmaking always resounded with the electric tension between state propaganda and individualistic artistry, often within a given film. Sure, the famous dialectic montage experiments from the 1920s salad days of Eisenstein and Pudovkin were motivated by pure Marxist guile, but it’s more difficult to see the extraordinary development of the long traveling shot as being anything but cinema rising to its own expressive level in spite of Politburo politics. Mosfilm was still the empire’s Hollywood, churning out populist fodder for the masses while sometimes conscientiously undercutting the government’s simplistic anti-Westernism to degrees that can make our own industry’s McCarthyite years seem outright pathetic.

The retro serves as a crash lesson in Russian film, starting obligatorily with Eisenstein’s BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925; September 11 at 5:15 pm). For too long now, this one has been reflexive university viewing to such a suffocating extent, American students may be surprised to find that early Soviet filmmaking was not all hammer-to-the-head editing and Marxist cant. In fact, Eisenstein’s position as one of the medium’s looming giants has silently deteriorated; the more time passes, the more mechanical and manipulative his work seems. The limitations were built-in: his entire æsthetic was predicated on his being the omniscient god and the audience his easily controlled minions. (Spielberg and Lucas, it could be said, have demonstrated similar sensibilities.) Free of historical intents or contexts, propaganda art is usually beguiling in its naïveté, but Battleship Potemkin feels bitter, as if revolutionary discontent unconsciously expressed Eisenstein’s outrage that of all the nations in all the eras for this artist to be born into, it had to be this one.

Darkness visible

MICHAEL ATKINSON — Mon, 19 May 2008 20:39:00 GMT

The HFA’s ‘Unseen Noir’ unveils America’s post-war gloom
Welcome to the dark territories again, the republic of bitterness and bile known as noir.

PITFALL André de Toth’s film teems with electric dialogue and potent real-life details.

“Unseen Noir” | Harvard Film Archive: May 23-26

Welcome to the dark territories again, the republic of bitterness and bile known as noir, as we square our jaws against an amoral universe and roam the rain-wet, lightless American City as if it were a Circle of the Inferno, where backstabbers, goldbrickers, and unfortunates march in closed patterns and puzzle over their fate. What can noir mean to us now? It’s not quite as easy to moon over the existential remarkability of the genre as it once was, when critics like Raymond Durgnat and Paul Schrader were busy specimen-boxing it as if it were a breed of black butterfly that had lived on our streets long ago and yet escaped our notice. Nowadays we’re somewhere near post-retro-neo-meta-noir; the original tropes (visual, gestural, thematic) are no longer recyclable even as TV commercials, and the Jim Thompson–rediscovery school is garnering yawns on the straight-to-video indie shelf. Sin City — please.

But the beauty of noir has always been its cultural specificity — the genre is bound wrist and ankle to the unexpected, untamable social malaise that arose during WW2 and exploded in the post-war era. The films are modern anthropology, as wickedly expressive of its context and anxious historical moment as Goya’s aquatints or Faulkner’s novels or Walker Evans’s photographs — but emanating from a kind of American-pulp unconscious, not from the conscientious perspective of a single artist. Suspicion and dread were in the air. As such, the original noirs are timelessly pertinent, and they remain the most resonant school of movie to have emerged in America. Consider that a half-century or more after the fact, the then-disregarded classics of the genre sit high on our trophy shelves and our archival-DVD rosters while the huge, big-budget hits of the ’45-’60 period — think Forever Amber (1947), Jolson Sings Again (1949), The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), The Robe (1953), White Christmas (1954), Guys and Dolls (1956), Around the World in 80 Days (1957), etc. — are forgotten like the blundering, uninsightful junk they were. Against the odds, film noir just does not get old.

Film on the fringe

MICHAEL ATKINSON — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 15:23:50 GMT

Jewishfilm.2008 explores the frontiers
Virtually every major city in this country hosts at least one “Jewish Film Festival” each year (even Baton Rouge and Dayton).

CHILDREN OF THE SUN: Ran Tal’s film is a personal oral history of the kibbutz, using only found footage and home movies.

Jewishfilm.2008 | Brandeis University + Harvard Film Archive + Institute of Contemporary Art: March 29–April 13

Virtually every major city in this country hosts at least one “Jewish Film Festival” each year (even Baton Rouge and Dayton), and if it seems there’s a paucity of worthwhile movies to fill up all those dockets, it’s still moving to view the phenomenon as a cultural sounding, as dispatches from an anxious frontier. The implicit effort to form some cohesive idea of “Jewish cinema” is doomed to struggle, because it confronts the same essence of 20th-century history that diasporized the race all over again. “Jewish cinema” is largely a cinema about living on the fringes of everywhere, and knowing the flux of human life across national lines better than the nations themselves.

If only this translated into better films. The one significant fiction feature in the Brandeis-centered Jewishfilm.2008 appears to be Ilya Motyleff & Sidney Goldin’s THE CANTOR’S SON (1937; Brandeis: March 30 at 4:15 pm), a grittier, more thoroughly musical, New York–shot revision of The Jazz Singer’s narrative template that may be the most exhilarating example yet exhumed of the once-thriving, completely global Yiddish cinema, which was made in the “ghetto tongue” and therefore was screenable in any city with Jews, from San Francisco to Warsaw. Robert Thalheim’s AM ENDE KOMMEN TOURISTEN|AND ALONG COME TOURISTS (2007; HFA: April 4 at 7 pm; Brandeis: April 6 at 7 pm) is an enervating and, finally, tasteless fizzle about a preposterously hunky German lad (Alexander Fehling) whose civil-service stint requires him to work at Auschwitz. There, no surprise, he develops a testy relationship with a camp-survivor codger (who of course learns to respect the naive kid) and a moony romance with a cute camp-tour guide. Whatever temptation there might have been to semi-satirize the present state of Holocaust tourist culture (à la Rex Bloomstein’s doc Kz) is abandoned early, in favor of a dull kind of tongue-tied sensitivity and an ardor for Fehling’s brooding profile.

Ayelet Menahemi’s NOODLE (2007; Brandeis: March 29 at 8 pm + April 13 at 7 pm), an Israeli sniffler, opts for schmaltzy melodrama and unlikely coincidences, as a lonely but lovely Tel Aviv widow (Mili Avital) gets stuck with the six-year-old son of her just-deported cleaning woman. You know where it’s headed: maternal aches, cute inter-cultural exchanges, outrageous heroism, big tears (and on top of that, irrelevant scads of sibling bickering and worrying about the heroine’s sister’s marriage).

Hell boy

MICHAEL ATKINSON — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 19:49:07 GMT

Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz at the ICA
Fassbinderians rejoice — your crucifixion, your tribulative martyrdom, has arrived.

FASSBINDERIANS REJOICE: Berlin Alexanderplatz is meant to express a psychological inferno, and it succeeds.

Fassbinderians rejoice — your crucifixion, your tribulative martyrdom, has arrived, in the restored re-release of a little ordeal called Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), the definitive altar upon which to test your faith in cinema. Non-Fassbinderians — will you dare? Infamous for its willfully unwieldy size (15-1/2 hours), the film qualifies as a cultural behemoth, a work that demands a revision in our method of watching, experiencing, and assessing cinema. It’s a pivotal giant in a very peculiar subgenre of arthouse movie — the TV mini-series-as-all-in-one-auteurwerk, alongside Bergman’s uncut Fanny and Alexander, Wolfgang Petersen’s uncut Das Boot, Kieslowski’s The Decalogue — but like all extremely long films, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s rampaging mega-work becomes, eventually, about its own length. Any film longer than, say, five hours inevitably calls its own basic shape and length into question, risking tedium and repetition but striving for experiential revelations and immersions for which ordinary mortal movies cannot hope. Some films use extreme time to disrupt our sense of reality (this is one facet of Jacques Rivette’s career scheme); others try to capture the breadth of an ambitious novel, neglecting the point that no one reads Dickens or Joyce or Mann in one or two sittings. (Hence the weekly broadcast mode, which shouldn’t be dismissed.) Taken as a whole, Fassbinder’s magnum opus — adapting the 1929 novel by Alfred Döblin that haunted Fassbinder his whole life, and that emerges in signs and fragments in many of his other movies — is not an alternate reality so much as a near-endless mildewy-bell-jar briefing for a descent into Hell, in an already hellish Weimar Germany, where women are bawling trash, men are lurking hyenas, and the world is a combustion engine run on souls.

It’s meant to express a psychological inferno, and it succeeds. (The first chapter, as in the book, is titled The Punishment Begins.) Fassbinder’s keening, in-your-face post-Sirk theatricality is an acquired taste (has anyone pointed out how his later films scan like a Leone-Morricone portrait of German lowlife?), and this is the harvest crop, epic in length but terrifyingly claustrophobic scene by scene, episode by episode, a nightmare of clueless doom in which Berlin is often reduced to a flat and a bar room photographed in the ocher haze of an opium den. What happens is like the slo-mo footage of a fatal car wreck: Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht), a great, bullish, dim lug of a man, is released from prison (he’s done a stint for manslaughter) and thrust back into his old life of pimping and violence. From the start, it’s clear that Biberkopf is unhinging, and as the hours press on and his struggle to stay honest and happy becomes truly hopeless, the film takes on the aura of a saintly tribulation. Indeed, Döblin’s novel, which ran neck and neck with the montage-of-voices experiments of Joyce and Dos Passos, is an existential tragedy about the post-war culture as much as about its protagonist, and Fassbinder goes for maximum iconicity. He helplessly loses much of the book’s tumultuous scope (as it was, the film was humonguously expensive for German TV, but how much bigger could it possibly have been?), training in instead on its hero, who in the uncomprehending, porcine person of Lamprecht becomes, 15 hours later, embedded in the brain like a fossilized footprint.

Portuguese man of war

MICHAEL ATKINSON — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 17:18:47 GMT

Manoel de Oliveira at the HFA
Manoel de Oliveira occupies a unique seat on the global film culture’s board of directors.

VALLE ABRAAO: A kind of exhaustive study of bovarysme rather than its dramatic expression.

“Manoel De Oliveira, or Cinema, The Art of Enigma” | Harvard Film Archive: March 15-29

Manoel de Oliveira occupies a unique seat on the global film culture’s board of directors — he’s routinely described as a long-time master who began when his native Portugal was still in the silent era, and whose career has lasted nearly 80 years since. And yet English-speaking filmgoers had no idea who he was until the early ’90s, when VALLE ABRAAO|ABRAHAM’S VALLEY (1993; March 29 at 3 pm) began making the festival rounds. He may be an unassailable mandarin, but his films — often beautiful but rarely stylish or innovative or thematically fresh — are wickedly difficult to make a case for. What’s more, they vary in form and tone, from formula melodramas to documentaries to meta-docs to post-mod Pirandello-isms to straight-on literary adaptations that long to be books rather than films. The fact that his output has accelerated as the accolades have mounted over the past decade is only more puzzling — when others would be retiring, Oliveira gives us movie after movie that begs to be indulged, with great affection, as the autumnal output of a codger deserving of, if not destined for, a Lifetime Achievement Oscar.

He is a beneficiary of ageist celebrity as surely as any twentysomething wunderkind. But it’s been difficult to look at him any other way; Oliveira is the only authentic Portuguese auteur anyone can name, a lone man standing in a Euro-culture robbed of a proper new wave. Having been devastated by a lengthy dictatorship and the persistent demons of late colonialism like no other Western European nation, Portugal has proved lately to be fertile soil for generational anomie and disaffected realism, as seen in the thorny, desolate films of Pedro Costa, Teresa Villaverde, and Manuela Viegas. But Oliveira has not become famous and beloved because of his Portuguese-ness — indeed, his late-stage blossoming is European Market–bound, marked by an eagerness to use French, Italian, and American stars, and screenplays written in French. He has become his own industry.

The Yacoubian Building

MICHAEL ATKINSON — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 19:41:19 GMT

Three-hour Egyptian epic
A massive Arabic soap opera, a Cairo-based Gone with the Wind.

The anti-Ozu

MICHAEL ATKINSON — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 22:02:18 GMT

Shohei Imamura at the HFA
You can draw the time line of the Japanese new wave in scores of different ways.

PIGS AND BATTLESHIPS: A battle between pigs for whatever slop there is.

“Vanishing Points: The Films of Shohei Imamura” | Harvard Film Archive: December 1-14

You can draw the time line of the Japanese new wave in scores of different ways — there were multiple possible launching points, and the big players evident in the ’50s and ’60s were young, old, and in between — but Shohei Imamura was an unarguably major, and quizzically ambiguous, figure in the landscape, an artiste among pulp mavens and a pop comic amid tragedians, a deep-dish cynic and a folksy absurdist. Dead last year at 79, the two-time Palme d’Or winner was one of the last of his slowly dying breed, survived still only by Seijun Suzuki, Kon Ichikawa, and Nagisa Oshima.

He may have also been the least categorizable filmmaker of the lot (always a handicap in an auteurist world), careless with genre and frenzied about social critique. At the same time, it would be difficult to mistake an Imamura film for anyone else’s — few filmmakers ever had a more dire view of mankind. His was rooted to the verities of Japanese life in extremis. His characters are rarely more than a few stealthy crawl paces away from homicidal jungle law and pig-sty madness. The son of a doctor, he began as a studio apprentice with Yasujiro Ozu, and he quickly established a distaste for his sensei’s restraint and quiet eloquence. (Even Imamura’s interior spaces — always an æsthetic priority in Japan — are deliberately cramped and chaotic, in direct contrast to Ozu’s famous, measured rooms.) In fact, he has always seemed a sort of Japanese Sam Fuller, fascinated with working-class ruin and primal impulse. And he could be viciously funny — which alone set him apart from most of his industry’s big guns. His first phase, beginning in 1958, was taken up with racy comedies and melodramas, but it wasn’t till PIGS AND BATTLESHIPS (1961; December 8 at 7 pm) that he became, immediately, an internationally known voice. A defining self-portrait of Japan in the post-war moment, the film visits a virtual war zone of threadbare urban iniquity, a Japanese coastal city in which everyone is either a whore or a pimp, where emergent gangs kill each other over the right to control the black market in US Army food scraps, where capitalism isn’t even predation or victimization but a battle between pigs for whatever slop there is. It’s a cruelly comic movie (with a gangster’s corpse that keeps needing to be redisposed of), for the most part, because of Imamura’s domineering, amused disdain for his subjects — here was Japan’s incarnation of Buñuel, omnisciently satiric and utterly cynical, if not as graceful and subtle, and lasering through the Buñuelian derision for hypocrisy (religious, social, sexual, etc.) to hit the raw bone of untempered lust and hunger.

Not such a wonderful place

MICHAEL ATKINSON — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 19:59:21 GMT

The 19th annual Boston Jewish Film Festival
The Boston Jewish Film Festival has always been more about the tenuous experience of that global community than about great films.

STARTING OUT IN THE EVENING: Not much Jewish content, but Lauren Ambrose and Frank Langella are enormously watchable.

“The 19th Annual Boston Jewish Film Festival” | Museum of Fine Arts + Coolidge Corner Theatre + Institute of Contemporary Art + Arlington Capitol + West Newton + Other Venues: November 1-11

Ostensibly an annual plunge into the Jewish diaspora as it has taken seed all over the planet, the Boston Jewish Film Festival has always been more about the tenuous experience of that global community than about great films. As it is, I’ve yet to see a “great” Israeli film — Amos Gitai’s Kippur comes closest — and only a handful of American films could be said to qualify. But what is a “Jewish film”? The festival has tended to throw its net almost meaninglessly wide; the sparest mention of or relation to Jewish character or history is more than enough.

Andrew Wagner’s STARTING OUT IN THE EVENING (MFA: November 8 at 7:30 pm, with the director present) has only its protagonist’s surname — Schiller — to recommend it as Jewish (something that might’ve surprised Friedrich Schiller). It may also be the fest’s most thoroughly adult movie: based on Brian Morton’s novel, the all-digitally-shot film centers on an aging, obsessive, out-of-print New York novelist (Frank Langella) who’s beset by a luscious and ambitious grad student (Lauren Ambrose) who wants not only to write her master’s thesis about him but also to insinuate herself into his life, his history, and his bed. The textures are sometimes coy (too much comfortable soundtrack piano doodling, too much should-be-satiric lit chat), but the story bumps into very sophisticated territory along the way, and Wagner leaves out the obvious scenes we’re half-expecting, letting the characters live in a three-dimensional, off-screen world. Most of all, the film has two enormously watchful actors; Langella is probably physically incapable by now of allowing any dialogue to sound trite, and when he rises to a boil, it’s restrained, old-school performance thrills at their rarest.

Enjoying perhaps only a respite from Holocaust documentaries, the fest’s non-fiction prioritizes the here and now, in Shimon Dotan’s HOTHOUSE (Coolidge Corner: November 4 at 8 pm), a full-frontal portrait of Israel’s enormous Palestinian prisoner population, all living in what a Fatah leader calls “universities of Palestinian nationalism,” and in Uri Rosenwaks’s THE FILM CLASS (Coolidge Corner: November 4 at 4 pm, with the director present), which follows a group of vivacious Afro-Bedouin women living in the Negev desert in their efforts to make a film about their own heritage — which turns out to lead back to slavery at the hands of “white” Bedouin less than a century earlier. Both are powerful and personally involving documentaries, if inconclusive and less than incendiary.

Dark new wave

MICHAEL ATKINSON — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 21:24:07 GMT

Contemporary Romanian cinema at the HFA
Every now and then, it happens: a new wave from where?

THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU: Kafka-esque in its shape but painfully particular in its details.

“The New Romanian Cinema” | Harvard Film Archive: October 5-7

The Line-Up
The Paper Will Be Blue | October 5: 7 PM
Traffic and The Way I Spent The End Of The World | October 5: 9 PM
C Block Story and Marinela From P7 | October 6: 7 PM
California Dreamin’ | October 6: 8 PM
The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu | October 7: 3 PM
Cigarettes And Coffee and Stuff And Dough | October 7: 7 PM
Liviu’s Dream and A Trip To The City and The Tube With A Hat | October 7: 9 PM

Every now and then, it happens: a new wave from where? In the case of Romania, a cataract of fresh cinema from this most ignored and betrodden of Eastern European nations seems more likely, in the overview, than cinema movements from Malaysia, Mexico, or Iran; one should never underestimate the historical gravitas that comes with generations of brutal Communist dictatorship, the reverb of its violent overthrow, or the deathless ancestral textures of Balkan-peninsula peasant culture. The Romanian films and their accolades have just begun to arrive: last year’s critical triumph of Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu — which won Best Film from the nation’s most expansive critics’ poll, on IndieWire.com, but pulled in, not so incomprehensibly, almost nothing at the box office — is followed this year by stateside releases of Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08 East of Bucharest and Christian Mungiu’s Four Months, Three Weeks, and Two Days, all three anointed by Cannes trophies. Suddenly, a poor ex-totalitarian nation that had little visible film culture for decades is now the hotbed of what the world’s film festivals are perceiving as new-millennium cool, fresh, expressive, and pertinent.

My first question: where’s Lucien Pintille? After the overthrow of Ceausescu in 1989, Pintille became the international auteur face of Romania, and his inaugural feature, The Oak (1992), remains a defining, damned-laughter vision of the landscape under dictatorship: risibly suicidal despair, explosive violence, Strangelovian military madness, post-industrial decay. (The film also introduced us to Razvan Vasilescu, Romania’s resident gruff Hackman/Duvall character-actor demiurge.) Already 56 when Ceausescu met the firing squad 18 years ago, Pintille may not be part of the new youth-marketing program: Puiu, Porumboiu, Mungiu, Christian Nemescu, and Catalin Mitulescu are all now 40 or under (Nemescu died last year in a car wreck, forever 27), and they were teenagers and film-school students when Romania became a “new democracy,” operating since, like so much of the Third World, on the outskirts of legality, poverty, and social order.

The Last Winter

MICHAEL ATKINSON — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 16:52:58 GMT

The big ideas get out, despite clumsy dialogue
Modern American psychotronica needs Larry Fessenden.

The Rape of Europa

MICHAEL ATKINSON — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 16:23:41 GMT

Art-love tunnel vision
The filmmakers are assuming that after so much documentation of murder and torture we could stand to consider instead the material and cultural losses.

Hairy Potter

MICHAEL ATKINSON — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 21:45:40 GMT

Hormones submit to dreary Order
Whatever else it may be, the Harry Potter Edda is surely the most popular narrative about the dawning of pubertal awareness ever created.

VIDEO: The trailer for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Harry Potter And The Order of the Phoenix | Directed by David Yates | Written by Michael Goldenberg Based on the novel by J.K. Rowling | with Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Michael Gambon, Imelda Staunton, Gary Oldman, Brendan Gleeson, David Thewlis, Fiona Shaw, and Alan Rickman | Warner Bros | 138 Minutes

Whatever else it may be, the Harry Potter Edda is surely the most popular narrative about the dawning of pubertal awareness ever created. And now, with the fifth Belgian block of a book adapted all-too-briskly to film, our Harry’s short hairs are growing wild and his hormonal self-pity is raging like a July forest fire. As Aleister Crowley always said, sex is magic and vice versa — which is why in J.K. Rowling’s world the apprentice sorcerers have always been so heavily regulated in their wand usage, and had their magical loins flexed harmlessly in sports, until such time as they can control their own transformative impulses. (Successful spells, after all, have an orgasmic ferocity.) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix has no time for Quidditch; the franchise staff (ostensibly led by Brit-TV director David Yates) dive right in, smooshing Rowling’s biggest book into the shortest film and treating the rich subtext — as well as much of the text — as dispensable.

Of course, puberty is a complex and ambiguous ordeal, and so — as we all know because we’ve all read the book already, and seen the other films — the right-and-wrong of magic becomes less clear-cut in this chapter, though the introduction of Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton, continuing the series’s typecasting hole-in-ones, and its exploitation of Mike Leigh’s Rolodex), the Ministry of Magic exec and new Dark Arts prof, is a bald-faced bit of social satire. Exercising a classic neo-conservative power maneuver, the prim and buttoned-up Umbridge virtually takes over Hogwarts with Puritan reasoning and sexual dread, a rule-choked process that feels as Stalinist as does any old-fashioned Catholic school. (She even toils at the behest of a Murdoch-like media magnate.) Better still, she reduces the sorcery syllabi to rote memorization focused on scoring high on standardized tests. No Wizard Left Behind is, she obnoxiously chirps, “what school is all about!”

Comme ci, comme ça

MICHAEL ATKINSON — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 20:19:43 GMT

No wave in sight at the Boston French Film Festival
The menu bops between feel-good indies and full-on commercial fare, with a few seasoned auteur numbers thrown in like rosemary twigs.

FLANDRES: Bruno Dumon returns to the uncommunicative, working-class lowlands.

The 12th Annual Boston French Film Festival | Museum of Fine Arts | July 12-29

A massive cross-section survey of what’s current and courant in French filmmaking as of early this year, the 2007 Boston French Film Festival adheres to a mainstream through-line — the menu bops between feel-good indies and full-on commercial fare, with a few seasoned auteur numbers thrown in like rosemary twigs. Which is to say, few risks are taken, mush-minded Hollywoodized entries already slated for stateside release proliferate, and a sense of homogeneity is inescapable. It may be France’s fault — now that the mildly celebrated New New Wave of the mid ’90s has cashed in and lost its mojo (think of the progressively less interesting work since then of Benoît Jacquot, André Téchiné, Jacques Doillon, Olivier Assayas, Cédric Klapisch, et al.), Gallic cinema seems to have little original or dangerous to share with us. As Michael Haneke’s Caché|Hidden and Philippe Garrel’s Les amants réguliers|Regular Lovers recently demonstrated, it’s not for lack of cultural dark materials — guiltily historical or otherwise. But the election of Nicolas Sarkozy may well be indicative of a recessive swale in the French temperament, a conservatism that has taken at least a momentary hold. Earnest, professional lint like Patrice Leconte’s opening-nighter, Ma meilleur ami|My Best Friend, is de rigueur, along with the evident desire to cash in with a US remake.

So, middle-class dramedies — dressed up with harmless sexual confusion — are numerous. Thierry Klifa’s LE HÉROS DE LA FAMILLE|FAMILY HERO (2006; July 15 at 5:15 pm and July 26 at 8 pm) centers on a wacky family’s efforts to save a bankrupt tranny cabaret; Rémi Bezançon’s MA VIE EN L’AIR|LOVE IS IN THE AIR (2005; July 14 at 4 pm and July 19 at 4:10 pm) dallies on the love life of an aviophobic pilot evaluator; Malik Chabane’s VOISINS VOISINES|NEIGHBORS (2005; July 19 at 6:15 pm and July 22 at 5:30 pm) focuses on a rapper bringing life and love to a snobby apartment complex. The rhythms throughout rarely vary from the distinctly French balance between Nora Ephron pandering and art-film restraint — an equilibrium better than what we ordinarily get from Burbank, but by now a tiresome half-measure that demonstrates only a modicum more audience respect. From a different school, Guillaume Nicloux’s LE CONCILE DE PIERRE|THE STONE COUNCIL (2006; July 28 at 6 pm and July 29 at 11 am) is a French-fried neo-gothic-conspiracy-thriller pulp-o-matic, roping in Siberian folklore, murderous international conspiracy, contemporary politics, the once-every-30-years-God-knows-why appearance of a miracle child, and a sniffly Monica Bellucci in a bob. Alternately nutty and sludgy, the film otherwise strives only to be a Sixth Sense/Da Vinci Code wave rider.

Mon Meilleur Ami | My Best Friend

MICHAEL ATKINSON — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 18:38:43 GMT

Yet another mismatched-buddy pairing
The set-up is so labored and unconvincing that it hardly matters when our hero latches onto Dany Boon’s trivia buff/cab driver.

Evan Almighty

MICHAEL ATKINSON — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 16:00:12 GMT

The movie of the summer for the timid Christian paranoiacs
Finally, the 21st-century redo of the Oh, God!

Flotsam and jetsam

MICHAEL ATKINSON — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 21:42:47 GMT

The tars are adrift in Ocean’s Thirteen
Steven Soderbergh’s third “Ocean” film is a pastry of a movie, airy, insubstantial, and meant to fill in the gaps between heartier meals.

VIDEO: The trailer for Ocean's Thirteen

Steven Soderbergh’s third “Ocean” film — continuing a franchise that is already miles beyond and hundreds of millions of dollars ahead of the Rat Pack paradigm from which it’s derived — is a pastry of a movie, airy, insubstantial, and meant to fill in the gaps between heartier meals. It could hardly be anything else; no one in 1960 needed to be told that the first Ocean’s 11 was all about sharing hang time with Sinatra and the boys as they tippled, improvised dialogue, and cracked one another up. The new films have reincarnated this situation: Clooney and Soderbergh are mildly notorious for preferring to work with their ever-expanding circle of friends, and so the films play something like this wise-ass brotherhood’s home movies, as the crew ironically act out the undemanding plots and in the meantime live their fantabulous lives. We can’t all quaff prime Chianti with Clooney on his Lake Como veranda, so this is the tidbit of star-fuck frisson we get instead.

One could hardly be blamed for getting worked into a cynical corner by Ocean’s Thirteen, which is pretty much like its brethren, minus Julia Roberts’s microgram of dramatic fuel. But that doesn’t mean, as summer movies go, that it isn’t witty, or grown-up, or sly, or diverting. It is, but it’s also absolutely disposable. This time, the original group clustered around Clooney’s Danny Ocean (they don’t seem to have lives otherwise, social or professional) become intent on pulling another massive, multi-pronged heist on another Vegas casino, solely because the owner (new villain Al Pacino) has goldbricked business partner Reuben (Elliott Gould), who subsequently suffers a heart attack. Soderbergh and his screenwriters would have us believe that Ocean’s confederacy of thieves (Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Bernie Mac, Don Cheadle, et al.) are one-for-all blood brothers who would risk their lives and their freedom for the sake of big-biz revenge. What’s more, they presume that we share the love in the room.

There are rewards: Casey Affleck’s techie, on a mission to load dice at the Mexican factory in which they’re manufactured, ends up leading a Zapatista workers’ rebellion, and Clooney and Pitt share an adorable offhand scene tearily watching an episode of Oprah. These are detours, of course, and we never miss the bath bubble of a narrative when it’s not floating around. When it is, the cataract of quick exposition and techno-yack can get numbing. (You wonder whether the plot line of Ocean’s Twenty-Five won’t take place entirely on a laptop.) Otherwise, the actors are offered only shtick, and since there are more of them this time (including Eddie Izzard’s heist consultant and Ellen Barkin’s casino dragon lady), the shtick time has shrunk in most cases to mere seconds.

Belle Toujours

MICHAEL ATKINSON — Thu, 17 May 2007 21:33:15 GMT

Quel dommage!
Manoel de Oliveira made this long-range sequel to Buñuel’s 1967 fetish classic Belle de jour .

Glee and venom

MICHAEL ATKINSON — Tue, 08 May 2007 22:37:46 GMT

Lacerating Harold Pinter at the Harvard Film Archive
Of the great modernist playwrights, Harold Pinter has had the most intimate relationship with film.

THE PUMPKIN EATER: Pure savage dialogue for Peter Finch and Anne Bancroft.

Of the great modernist playwrights, Harold Pinter has had the most intimate relationship with film, having wrangled with movies and TV, as an adapter or an adaptee, in more than 60 projects over almost 50 years. That includes no fewer than five versions of his abstracted 1957 psychodrama The Birthday Party. (Scandinavians, generally speaking, cannot stop filming Pinter.) It’s easy to see why: he’s the wordsmith who taught culture that dramatic arenas are by definition built out of presumption, questionable faith, and the bottomless mystery of language. The nailbiting bridge between Beckett and Mamet in his plays, Pinter has at the same time been happy to subsume his stylizations to the service of other visions. It’s unlikely that any other screenwriter has adapted as many eminent authors: Kafka, Fitzgerald, Bowen, Hartley, Fowles, Atwood, McEwan, etc., though sometimes the results have resembled the work of any dozen other hyper-literate British writers.

As laid bare in the Harvard Film Archive retrospective that starts this Sunday, Pinter’s career in movies is spotty. Of course, the blame for the failure of such films as Elia Kazan’s THE LAST TYCOON (1976; May 27 at 7 pm and May 28 at 5 pm) rarely falls on the scriptwriter, particularly one who’s established as a theatrical pioneer, and who’s famous as well for writing what’s been published as The Proust Screenplay, an unproduced adaptation that’s occasionally hailed as the greatest screenplay ever written. (One supposes you’d have to finish reading Proust, as I haven’t, to assess that claim.) Winning a Nobel late in the day clinches the deal.

But the contribution Pinter’s voice made to the ’60s British New Wave is indelible. His partnership with Joseph Losey virtually defined British cinema between 1963 and 1970, and that definition became one of the New Wave era’s most caustic portraits of national consciousness anywhere. There’s an element of disenchantment in the johnny-come-lately American and German New Waves, but for the most part it was the Brits whose films rummaged through their own society’s closet of prejudices and injustices and hung it all out to dry like plucked chickens. The biggest bone of contention was class. THE SERVANT (1963; May 25 at 7 pm and May 26 at 9 pm) remains both its director’s and its screenwriter’s pre-eminent work, a methodical, shadowy sociological knife fight between a wealthy, complacent bachelor (James Fox) and his hired manservant (Dirk Bogarde), who acts like a polite agent of low-birth political chaos, maliciously challenging every tenet of power and privilege the upper classes hold dear. Subtle but as forceful as a plank to the face, The Servant might be the toughest-minded and, outside of Powell & Pressburger, the most resonant British film of the post-war era.

Gay abandon?

MICHAEL ATKINSON — Tue, 01 May 2007 21:39:20 GMT

The edge has gone from the Gay and Lesbian Film Festival
Has gay cinema become a mere ghetto nowadays, of interest to its sexual demographic and no one else?

EL CALENTITO: Vinyl nun’s habits and bared breasts? Count us in.

Has gay cinema become a mere ghetto nowadays, of interest to its sexual demographic and no one else? So it would seem in the light of the past decade or so of gay-themed indies, the default nature of which seems to be a blind desire to reach a perfect middle state of bland unadventurousness, and to lure middle-class het audiences with sappy tales of awkward romance, campy frolic, and simplistic tolerance sermons. Used to be, in the early ’90s and amid the acidic launch of what was soon thereafter called the New Queer Cinema, that hacksaw-edged movies on the order of Greg Araki’s The Living End, Tom Kalin’s Swoon, Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, Todd Haynes’s Poison, Christopher Munch’s The Hours and Times, and Derek Jarman’s Edward II were acts of radical culture designed to express, to everyone regardless of orientation, not how truly similar their gay characters were to straights but how outrageously, irksomely different. Most important, the films themselves adopted experimental means, and in form as well as thrust they endeavored to be nobody’s grandmother’s nice idea of a harmless, assimilated homosexual demographic.

Today, and for whatever it’s worth from a hetero critic whose own fashionably thorny rebel days are officially behind him, the bite seems to have gone out of the blow job. Too often, the perspectives and dynamics offered up are nothing you couldn’t find in a made-for-WE movie or a Nancy Meyers ripoff. At this year’s Boston Gay & Lesbian Film/Video Festival, the crop continues to explore what are apparently seen as the only exploitable assets of gay culture in general: chick-lit-style romance, identity transitionism, and burlesque performance. If the first of these manifests mostly as a quest for mainstream sympathy, the next two stupefy with their ubiquitous self-aggrandizement. Had a Martian, or a Wisconsin middle-classer, endured a sizable hunk of contemporary gay film, you could hardly blame him or her or it for coming away with the sense that gay culture is largely an expression of gargantuan narcissism.

Life, truth, and Jean-Luc

MICHAEL ATKINSON — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 23:06:55 GMT

2 or 3 things we know about Godard
Jean-Luc Godard is 76 now, of fading productivity and perhaps fading health, and so we’re faced with the unfathomable prospect of no longer living in the Age of Godard.

THE “ELLE” MAY BE PARIS, but the real subject is the conversation we and Godard are having.

Jean-Luc Godard is 76 now, of fading productivity and perhaps fading health, and so we’re faced with the unfathomable prospect of no longer living in the Age of Godard. The last half-century may have been the era of Americanization, post-WW2 scab picking, Vietnam, rock and roll, TV, civil rights, fashionable Communism, fashionable Christian fascism, despotic commercialism, the Internet, Middle East armageddonism, Henry Kissinger, Coke, microwaves, Steven Spielberg, and Madonna (a very Godardian list). But it was also, and for many it was primarily, the time of Godard. He has been cinema’s premier modernist, its most audacious and forward-seeing pioneer, as well as our most recalcitrant anti-sellout rebel god, our most eloquent and infuriating commentator on the empty-hearted state of humanity, and our irreverent guide through the mirrored hallways of media, meaning, communication, and ethical responsibility. Godardianism may not fade altogether with the man himself — après Godard we will still be here, sorting through the rubble even as it accumulates at an exponential rate. But who else will do the spade work the way he did, the relentless, loving, uncompromised dissection of the modern age in all its amorality, cheapness, banality, forgetfulness, and greed?

Devotees know that the 1960s were the man’s Homeric salad days: he churned out in a single decade (amid a plethora of short films used as chapters in portmanteau ensembles) no fewer than 18 masterpieces — except they’re not (or rarely) finished masterpieces but tumultuous dialogues with the audience, filmed essays, questions asked, notebooks left to reorganize. Enjoying a 40-year-anniversary restoration, 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle|Two or Three Things I Know About Her is one of the most troublesome films of Godard’s golden decade: frankly and fiercely personal, marking a definitive break with genre (only ever used by Godard as a toy, but still), and never as focused in its attack as Les carabiniers, Weekend, La Chinoise, or even Alphaville. And there’s no Anna Karina: New Wave cinema’s Trilby and Svengali were getting divorced. But as always with Godard what seems at first to be a vulnerability or a failing becomes the movie’s unique personality and identity — we must acclimate to it, not grasp our lazy entertainment expectations as if they were fenceposts in a storm.