Jean Grémillon Restoration x2 at Metrograph

Jean Grémillon, largely overlooked and underrated among poetic realism directors of 1930s in French cinema, finally gets some well-deserved recognition with his two films - Lady Killer and The Strange Mister Victor, from the height of his career, beautifully restored from original negative to 4K by Hiventy and Pathé. New York's Metrograph is giving them a two-week theatrical run in the US for the first time, starting 8/4. With his depiction of complicated human nature and sophisticated technical prowess, Grémillon deserves to be put in the same league with his better known contemporaries, Renoir and Carné. True cinephiles shouldn't miss a chance to see Grémillon films in theaters in pristine conditions like this. Grasshopper is releasing.

Lady Killer/Gueule d'amour (1937) In the tradition of a fatalistic romance, Lady Killer features the biggest heartthrob at the time, Jean Gabin, playing a soldier named Bourrache, stationed in Orange, Southern France. Because of his good looks and charm, he's known by his nickname, Gueule d'amour/lady killer among local women. The story takes a turn when Bourrache meets Madelene (Mirielle Balin), a high-society Parisian girl in Cannes, where he lends her money that he just inherited from a relative, at the casino, which she subsequently blows at the gambling den. Then she ditches him. This is the first time a woman did that to him and he can't forget her. After being discharged from the military, he looks her up in Paris, only to be seduced dumped, when confronted by her rich, old benefactor. Dejected and heartbroken, Burrache moves back to Orange and opens up a little bistro and leads a simple country life. Then Madelene appears again, tracking him down by seducing his army doctor friend to find his whereabouts. She turns out to be a archetypal femme fatale, a controlling monster one loves to hate.

Working with German cinematographer Günther Rittau (Metropolis), Lady Killer has some impressive shadowplay recalling German Expressionism. It should also be noted that Lady Killer reflects the sentiment of France at the eve of WWII - public's penchant for men in uniform (Fascism), decent, ordinary men being corrupted by decadence (Capitalism, consumerism).

The Strange Mister Victor (1938) On the surface, Victor Agardanne (Raimu) is an upstanding citizen of Toulon, a bustling port city in Southern France. He is a gregarious and bumbling man, who owns a successful general store. But he is in cahoots with criminals who've been making the local newspaper headlines with a series of violent robberies. After one of the robbers, Amédée, threatens Agardanne with blackmail, Victor kills him with a local cobbler's tool. Bastien the cobbler, gets convicted of a crime and gets 10 years of hard labor in the penal colony.

7 years have passed, Bastien escapes the colony only to come back to Toulon to see his young son. Guilt ridden Victor, has not been the same person as before - moody and irritable to his long suffering wife Madeleine and his young son, hides Bastien from the authorities at his home while playing a good hearted protector, who insists on the innocence of the fugitive. With Amédée's associates and authorities on his trail, Victor and Bastien will need to figure their way out.

The Strange Mister Victor is a taut morality tale with great characters all around. Great character actor and comedian Raimu shines as the title character with great range and humanity. Again, Grémillon shows his skills in sketching out the details of the locale and characters as well as balancing the mood of the film from comedic moments to thriller elements.

4K transfer is done from its original nitrate negative and other sources for The Strange Mister Victor in 2020 by Pathé and its lively city symphony of Toulon in the beginning is gorgeous to look at. Review of Grémillon's Remorques

People Who Remain

Streetwise (2021) - Na Na Jiazuo's rain soaked neonoir, Streetwise, gets a much-deserved theatrical run stateside. I say this because it's just gorgeous to look at in its grimy, urban decay glory. Set in anytown China in 2000s, where economic growth has considerably cooled, and once bustling streets are now deserted and shops shuttered. There's sense of hopelessness in the air.

Streetwise tells a group of the lonely, lost souls who occupy these wet, decaying dwellings and their sordid lives fatefully entwined like a tangled web which they can't escape from. Zidong (Li Jiuxiao), a gawky young man, is first seen tearing up a mahjong parlor where a debtor hangs out. He is a muscle man for a wry debt collector, Jun, who walks with a limp, probably from some shenanigans from his shady past. By the looks of it, Zidong is a rookie at whatever he does, with Jun constantly showing him the ropes.

Zidong keeps borrowing money from the local tattoo artist Jiu (Huang Miyi) to pay for his dad's mounting medical bills. Dad, once a leader of the street gang, due to his age and health, is forever committed to a hospital bed. Still spry, he still gets into fights and unsavory situations. Zidong and Jiu seem to have a special relationship where they keep each other company without wanting anything other than consoling their loneliness. Their relationship is a purely platonic one, like that of brother and sister. And they might as well be- Zidong's dad keeps insisting that she is a bad luck and they shouldn't ever sleep with each other, not only because she is the ex-wife of the boss, known as Four, the head of a local gang who oversees Jun and Zidong, but also was a protégé of Zidong's dad.

Zidong and Jiu contemplate skipping town and go live somewhere else countless times, even though they don't know where to go. Four, getting rejected repeatedly by Jiu for his pleas to get back together, is getting antsy about Zidong hanging around the tattoo parlor too much. In the meantime, Jun plots revenge after Four humiliates him in front of everyone.

Everyone in Streetwise is trying to runaway from something- the past, dire financial circumstances, love, misplaced loyalty, and themselves, but fails to do so. They can't get away from their own reflections in the putrid puddle strewn with trash in the street.

Jiu briefly leaves the cursed town, only to come back for Zidong and confront her fate.

Li in the role of Zidong bristles with youthful energy and puppy dog innocence. Huang, a graceful beauty, fits reminds me a lot of young Shu Qi.

Na creates a perfect neon colored urban purgatory where lost souls can't ever leave. Everything has a hazy, dreamy, not quite real feel to Streetwise. Even in crowded places like karaoke bars or hospital elevators has otherworldly quality to it. No one is purely evil or saintly. Everyone has baggage and weak spot for certain things or someone. It's that sinewy human connections that Na explores with exceptional visuals and everyday poetry.

Familial Boundaries

The Line (2022) - Meier The film starts with a tour de force slo-mo of household items thrown against the wall – the plates, bottles, records, vases, anything that is in the reaches of Margaret (Stéphanie Blanchoud) can hurl at her mom Christina (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi). It’s a total mayhem. The scene ends with Margaret striking Christina in the face and her head hitting the grand piano in the living room.

Next, we see is Margaret getting a restraining order. She can’t be within the hundred meters of the Christina’s house. With nowhere to go, Margaret, a singer, take temporary refuge in her former lover and bandmate, now a music producer Julien (Benjamin Biolay)’s apartment.

It’s up to Margaret’s young stepsister, Marion (Elli Spagnolo), a churchgoing devout middle schooler, whose communion’s coming up, to keep peace between her mom and her sister as they are both very volatile people. To prevent Marion from getting into more trouble with the law, Marion decides to paint the boundary around the house a hundred-meter distance fence made of light blue paint, this means the field, the road, the creek that goes through the small Swiss town they live in.

In the school, they already make fun of little Marion as a chubby little goodie two shoes. With the scandal Margaret caused is well known in the small town, the taunting is worse. But Marion doesn’t care. She loves them both equally: her imperfect mom, a former famous concert pianist, who doesn’t seem to find a true love and taking up one young boyfriend after another, and her emotionally unstable, violent sister Margaret. She prays day and night for reconciliation of the two.

Marion and Margaret meet at a field just outside the blue line overlooking the house to practice Margaret’s choir singing for her communion with an extended power cable for Margaret’s guitar amp. She incessantly asks for how mom’s been doing. Marion’s reluctant to tell her that her attack left mom half-deaf on her right ear and had to stop giving piano lessons.

Ursula Meier examined what constitutes home and family and its physical and metaphorical boundaries with her previous features – Home (2008), and Sister (2012). With The Line, she continues to illustrate the theme with literally drawing the line on the dirt. The line must be respected and cannot be crossed, not only because it’s against the law, but it is drawn by an innocent child. It would be a betrayal of her love and trust to break it.

Blanchoud, the wild-eyed actress and musician is perfect for volatile Margaret, whose hot temper drives people away from her. Bruni Tedeschi is also superb as a self-centered, nihilistic woman-child who had kids too young and too old.

As usual, Meier sketches out a dysfunctional family which is still a family, nonetheless. And she is wise enough not to question her characters motives or dig their backgrounds too deeply and let silence do the talking.

The Line opens on 3/31 at Metrograph, New York, as part of Permeable Boundaries: The Films of Ursula Meier and also Lensed by Agnès Godard. Meier and Godard will be at the Q&A post-screening on 3/31 and 4/2.

Boys Don't Cry

Procession (2021) - Greene 

Robert Greene, no stranger to the participatory, process oriented cinematic experiments (Actress, Kate Plays Christine, Bisbee 17'), presents a powerful documentary about a highly controversial subject - a rampant child sexual abuse by catholic priests. Procession, the filmmaker's collaboration with the abuse victims and a drama therapist, is perhaps the most powerful and impactful documentary I've ever seen since Act of Killing.


Greene, who moved to Missouri in 2015, to become Filmmaker-in-Chief for the Murray Center for Documentary Journalism at the University of Missouri, saw a news clip in 2018: a news conference of an attorney Rebecca Randle, who's been overseeing hundreds of abuse cases involving catholic priests in Kansas City and surrounding area over decades, accompanied by three victims, accusing many still practicing catholic priests of sexual abuses, when the victims were altar boys in grade school. This explosive and emotional news clip was a springboard for Procession, a project three years in the making, which premiered at this year’s Telluride Film Festival.


There's Tom, Michael, Mike, Joe, Ed and Dan. These participants are there to reenact the most painful memories of the abuses, to confront and crush their fears that haunted them most of their adult lives. What's striking from the very beginning of the film is their immediate strong bonds - awareness, love and understanding of each other among 6 men who never knew one another before the project began. For me, it is their kinship, borne out of collective trauma that is the main takeaway of this immensely moving film. 


There are the green glowing eyes of a priest and mass attending public‘s accusing glances which make the victims feel powerless. There’s the power of coercion in the confessional and the church appointed ‘independent review board’ rejecting claims of abuse from the victim for lacking merits. By reenacting these scenes and playing the roles of each other's abusers, there is a real danger it might backfire and harm the participants, and everyone involved in the project is acutely aware of this. But it’s their commitment toward the project, to honor the victims who lost their lives to suicide, alcohol and drugs after the abuse and to hold those responsible accountable by exposing them in these scenes and to help each other that outweighs the risk.


For many of them, just being inside of a church is hard. It's in the small things that trigger the suppressed, painful memories to come to the surface. For some, it's the smell of incense, the wood varnish on the pews or the chlorine of the swimming pool, or the color of stained glasses or the dark wood furnishings that bring up those memories. Gestures, hands in the religious ritual take on the significance in their suppressed memories too. And they are all put on the screen. The settings and items that should bring the feelings of security and comfort, instead, they've become things of nightmares for the participants.


There's a lot to be said about the hypocrisy of being 'men of god' and those in power in these pedophile priest cases. It was the sense of powerlessness as a young boy many victims felt that led to much undeserved self-blame and shame. By writing their own scenario and directing their own reenactments, Greene recognizes the power shift that can be beneficial and even cathartic for those who are participating. And a lot of catharses and breakthroughs happen  before your eyes in Procession.


You can't help but being teary eyed watching these grown men who's been trying to suppress those memories and they manifested terribly into their lives- recurring nightmares, insomnia, feeling of guilt, shame, relationship, trust issues and anger.  There is also an added context to the film taking place in Missouri and Wyoming, that this is the epitome of the American Midwest, where men were taught to be tough.

In Bisbee ’17, Greene involved entire community to participate in reenacting a centenary historical event for understanding and healing. In Procession, tending to only those 6 participants, the emotional impact is much greater with them telling their own intimate experiences. If historical context and taking artistic liberty in portraying the event was necessary in Bisbee, the filmmaker rightfully chooses not to delve too much into participants’ personal lives, but rather zero in on the abuses and its effects in Procession.

Procession also tells the power of popular narratives. Ed Gavagan, a contractor from New York, likens the participants including himself as the Avengers, uniting to fight for justice using the hammer of Thor, in the beginning of the film. A member of the film crew hands him a sledgehammer to destroy the set after finishing shooting his reenactment, as he gratefully accepts it to finish the job- having a breakthrough, in the most literal sense.

Netflix is doing the world a favor for picking the film up for its distribution and streaming. Procession needs to be seen broadly and widely discussed and the pedophile priests need to be exposed out in the open.  The personal stories of Joe Eldred, Mike Foreman, Ed Gavagan, Dan Laurine, Michael Sandridge, and Tom Viviano need to be widely seen and their kinship celebrated. Procession is one of the most powerful and important documentaries ever made.

Made in Hong Kong 4K Restoration is a Gutter Punk Goodness

Made in Hong Kong (1997) - Fruit Chan

Fruit Chan's Made in Hong Kong came out right after Hong Kong Handover to Mainland China in 1997. With its youthful energy and boisterous amateur cast, the film reflects rather an anxious and pessimistic view of what lays ahead for the new generation facing uncertainty.

It's a kinetic, viseral, shoe-string budget film about a wayward high school drop out/triad wannabe Moon (Sam Lee in a star making role) working as a low level debt collector. Moon spends most of his days jerking off, going through his mom's purse, hanging out with his buddy Sylvester (Wenders Li), a big simpleton who gets bullied around by high school students. Moon terrorizes people who owe Big Brother Cheung money for living.

On one of these runs for collecting money, he meets Ping (Neiky Hui-Chi Yim), a naif with a pixie haircut and falls in love. They soon become an inseparable trio, roaming the busy streets of Hong Kong, having fun. But their carefree lives turn sour after witnessing a suicide of a high school girl named Susan in the neighborhood. Being in possession of the dead girl's suicide note haunt Moon, all throughout, as he procrastinates to do the right thing and return it to her parents.

Moon finds out Ping is dying of a kidney failure and Sylvester is always in need of his protection from the bullies. Then there is a turf war in the neighborhood involving his rival Fat Chan that he has to reckon with.

Made in Hong Kong does not only serve as an anxiety ridden, wayward youth film but also work as a time capsule. Fruit Chan has captured some extraordinary details of the places in Hong Kong in late 90s on celluloid: overcrowded subsidized housing projects, bustling city markets, decrepit corridors and alleys, long stair cases, signs and architecturally uneven skyline of the forever changing city. If Chris Doyle lensed Hong Kong in Wong Kar-Wai movies are hyper romanticized version of the city, Made in Hong Kong, shot by O Sing-pui (who went on to shoot Ip-Man), presents an energetic, ghetto punk version of the same city through a glass darkly.

There are some spectacular scenes that stands out in the film: a steep mountain top cemetery of Chai Wan as the trio runs around looking for the Susan's grave. The kinetic hit sequence where Moon fails to kill the businessmen, alternating between attempt and fantasy, Moon being attacked by a skateboarding hitman with a screwdriver sent by Fat Chan. Made in Hong Kong is filled with nervous energy all the way through its pessimistic, melancholic end.

In 2017, on the 20th anniversary of its release, Made in Hong Kong was restored by the Udine Far East Film Festival (Italy), starting from the original camera negatives and working under the direct supervision of Fruit Chan and cinematographer O Sing-pui. The restoration is as authentic and true to the original film as possible. The film is gorgeous to look at. Pristine images preserve Hong Kong in its uncertain times and jittery atmosphere perfectly, like in a time capsule. See it on the big screen. You won't be disappointed. The film opens Friday 3/6 at Metrograph

Kaili Blues, The Most Impressive Debut in Years

Kaili Blues (2015) - Bi
A country doctor's search for his nephew becomes an unforgettable existential road trip in Kaili Blues, directed by a 26-year old Chinese filmmaker, Bi Gan. It's an ambitious, mesmerizing film that you'd never think it is the work of a first time director. I don’t think I’ll be seeing another film as audacious and beautiful as this one anytime soon.

Chen (Chen Yongzhong) lives and works as an assistant doctor in Kaili, a sub-tropical region of southeast China. Through Chen’s sporadic conversation with the elderly woman doctor and with his irresponsible half-brother, Crazy Face, we gather Chen's past: he was in jail for taking the rap for his boss. His sickly wife died while he was incarcerated. Crazy Face resents the fact that their mother left Chen her house to continue housing the doctor's clinic to this day.

Crazy Face's young son, Weiwei, neglected and locked up most of the time at home while he's out gambling, is in danger of being sold off, according to townsfolk. It's usually under Chen's care Weiwei eats properly and goes to school. One day, Chen finds Weiwei missing and discovers that Crazy Face has dumped him at his old boss's house who lives in nearby Zhenyuan, because he is fleeing Kaili in order to evade debtors and won't take the boy with him. The old doctor happens to have an old fling living in Zhenyuan, of whom she hasn’t seen since the days of the Cultural Revolution, and wants Chen to find him and deliver a shirt and a mix-tape she made for him, too. So begins Chen's dreamlike journey, where past, present and future are all mixed in with lush greenery and sinewy river system in picturesque Southern China.

The 40 minute no-cut, wide angle traveling shot on a moped in the middle of the film is a legend in the making – it is a pure bravura filmmaking at its most playful and a feast for your senses. Wang Tianxing's fluid camera work is just as much a star in Kaili Blues. Even though all the scenes are exquisitely framed and every slow pan shot beautifully and meticulously composed, the technical aspect doesn't overshadow the overall lucid, mysterious, fantastic tone of the film. The camera freely moves from one conversation to another, often mingling with Chen's beautiful poetry (the director's own, I'm told) voiceover.

I think of Kaili Blues as school of fish. All the small characters and stories and their connections are illusive, fluid and gone in a flash, but when caught, every one of those fishes are unique, shiny, slippery individual jewels. The only way to catch them is with a net and your hands in the water. This very loose and thin net, full of holes and tears, that Bi uses is made of seemingly unrelated recurring motifs -- Weiwei's hand drawn clocks, an old photograph of the old doctor's lover, motor bikes, a disco ball, a childish pop song -- and Bi deliberately doesn't catch them all. What's left is a palpable, lasting sensation of fish swimming and touching your hands as they get away from your grasp.

I don’t want to pull ageism here but Kaili Blues doesn’t feel like a debut film of a 20 something director. If I had to compare it to the works of another filmmaker, I guess the film most resembles the films of Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao Hsien, particularly Goodbye South, Goodbye but with added lyricism and dreamlike quality. Infinitely wise and breathtakingly beautiful, Kaili Blues is definitely one of the very best films I've seen so far this year.

Kaili Blues has an exclusive one week engagement at New York's Metrograph, starting on May 20.

DIY Mission to Mars

A Space Program (2015) - Neistat

The moon landing conspiracy theories have been around -- and a constant subject for documentaries and narrative films -- since Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon in 1969.

The story goes that Stanley Kubrick was hired by NASA to fake it because they didn't have resources or technology and were on tight deadline from the commander in chief. It was the Cold War era and the space race was on full swing. There are at least a couple of movies that are already out about this very subject this year alone: Antoine Bardou Jacquet's Moonwalkers and Matt Johnson's Operation Avalanche.

In keeping with this tradition, A Space Program, directed by Van Neistat (HBO's The Neistat Brothers), documents Tom Sachs' 2012 interactive installation show Space Program 2.0: MARS in 33,000 square feet Park Avenue Armory in New York. Sachs, a sculptor known for his ironic take on brand name products via DIY means, set out to do a massive scale interactive show about a staged space mission to Mars with all the materials built from scratch.

Audiences were invited to experience a TV-studio-like fake retro Mars landing in all seriousness. The result was an entertaining spectacle of make-belief and a performance art on stage that successfully faked the NASA Control Room dramatics. Neistat, who with his brother Casey started his career making fun of Apple's lack of a battery replacement policy in a short video, is a good choice to chronicle Sachs' highly idiosyncratic endeavor.

The documentary covers the installation show in painstaking detail. Think of A Space Program as a DIY version (everything was built with plywood, tape and epoxy glue) of a Mars landing movie co-directed by Wes Anderson and Michel Gondry and you get the picture, perhaps slightly less whimsical. On stage, we see how things are laid out: a makeshift Control Room, working replica of life size Moon/Mars Lander, and surface of Mars all right next to each other.

The elaborate Control Room set up is quite impressive: multiple old style tube monitors with handwritten signs, switchboard and speakers manned by men (including Sachs) in white half-sleeve button down shirts, horn rimmed glasses and black ties. Many of them don big mustache and seizelessly smoke cigarettes. Everything is captured by DIY TV studio cameras and small handheld, wired DIY video cameras, from astronauts going into the lander (using the rickety ladders to climb up and into) to the launch of the historical Mars landing.

Glued to the grainy video feed on the big screen, they eat their McDonald's dinner. Our lovely astronauts are steel metal worker Sam (Sam Rataranat) and Carpenter Mary (Mary Eannarino). After the Wes Anderson style character introductions with their funny code names, brief bios and catchy visuals, the narrators put an emphasis on the mission's real mission: Putting the first woman on Mars.

Throughout the mission, we are informed with helpful hand drawn and physical instructions on the complicated inner-workings of tybek space suit, ingenuous compartmental system of Mars Lander interior, a shelf full of space-food (rows of whiskey bottles) and a graphic demonstration on how to use a space toilet.

A big globe is a stand-in for the mother earth. A giant unevenly shaped red ball is Mars. They simply fake the space travel with the combination of stock footage, pulling the small makeshift camera on a string and toy rockets on a wire with hand drawn, LED lit background.

As if these cool technical specifications and all the handmade gadgets aren't enough, we have Lt. Sam and Commander Mary's team dynamics battling for our attention. After their successful launch into space, they are seen tending to their lesbian tendencies rather than their astronaut duties. Once they get to Mars, tempers fly and blame games begin when the mission doesn't go as they planned (getting samples of Mars soil in search of intelligent life).

Our astronauts finally get the samples after digging through the Mars surface (the hardwood floor) with a hack saw and circular saw and send it back to earth in dramatic fashion while their oxygen running critically low. The entire Control Room team watches their mission on the big monitor, completely gripped. And live audiences watch them from their bleecher seat and we watch the whole thing on screen. Would they make it? This is a nail-biting, edge of your seat stuff!

A Space Program's charm largely depends on Sachs' ingenuous designs, his attention to details and playfulness- from life size Mars Landers to plywood constructed, red painted Mars rocks to fake seriousness of his crew. His ironic take on name branding, this time the NASA logo, is seen everywhere- the space suit, the Lander, tumblers on the desks and many more. Neistat's snappy visual style is a good match for Sachs' idiosyncratic creations. The film isgreat fun.

A Space Program opens on March 18 at Metrograph in New York and April 7 at Cinefamily in Los Angeles. Zeitgeist Films is releasing the film. Please visit their website for more roll out dates and other information.