Choices

Les choses de la vie/Things of Life (1970) - Sautet

Pierre (Michel Piccoli) seems to have everything- he's a successful architect with a great apartment, a house in an island full of memories, a well-behaved, loving son, a beautiful ex-wife (Lea Massari) who doesn't hate him, a luminous mistress (Romy Schneider) who adores him. He's been vacillating lately about leaving Helene (Schneider) and go back to Catherine (Massari) because he has so many beautiful memories with his family even though he loves Helene very much. He fears that they will grow apart and fall out of love, just like any other relationship. Les Choses de la vie examines his life as he experiences fatal car crash which repeats many times in slow motion throughout the film.

It's a fluffy adult melodrama about however little choices we make in real life largely figure into the outcome, whatever it maybe, that life is always full of regrets. Acting from Piccoli, Schneider and Massari are superb. The best part, aside from Schneider typing naked with only with horn-rimmed glasses on, is the love triangle depicted carefully with great subtlety: as Pierre laying on the ground dying after the crash, thinking about the break-up letter he wrote to Helene and desperately wishing it wouldn't reach her. Catherine is handed the letter after Pierre is pronounced dead at the hospital, she reads it and sees Helene rushing into the hospital through the window and tears the letter to shreds. Delicious stuff.

Petite-Bourgeoisie

Diary of a Chambermaid (1964) - Buñuel

A pretty Parisienne Celestine (Jeanne Moreau), comes to the county to be a chambermaid for the rich Monteil family, specifically to take care of M. Rabour, old frail father of Mme. Monteil, who is a snobby coldfish. Celestine finds herself the center of attention of sexually frustrated boorish man-child M. Monteil (Michel Piccoli), Rabour, Joseph the man servant, and a nosy retired army captain neighbor.

It being Buñuel film, it's an all out satire where no one is spared - the rich, the army, the religion, our heroine, and above all, the jingoistic whole France.

The old man dies suddenly and a little girl from the neighborhood is found raped and butchered. Celestine, suspecting the killer is Joseph, decides not to go back to Paris and stay with the family until she gets a confession out of him.

Even though Celestine is the only one who mourns the death of the little girl, it is suggested that she might have killed the old man during their foot fetish sessions- he was found dead clutching at the patented leather shoes he made her to wear.

With the use of wide angle lenses, dolly movements and zoom-ins, the film is technically impressive. But the two of the most striking images are static shots - of the dead girl's body obscured by a tree trunk and snails crawling over her lifeless legs and of the face of an old house servant, who's just told by Monteil to be sexually subjugated. Her tearful face says a thousand words.

In a world of Chambermaid, it's always the little ones, the powerless ones suffer and their sufferings go unnoticed and everyone is morally bankrupt swindlers. Celestine would go so far as bedding and marrying Joseph to admit his guilt and even ending up planting a discriminating evidence for the police against him. But being a petite-bourgeoisie, she ends up marrying the petty neighbor and becoming the Mme. of the house, ordering him around in the midst of the rise of national jingoistic fervor everywhere.

It's a great satire and impressively made one. But it's a hard film to like.

Making Film is a Bitch

Passion (1982) - Godard













Film financing is a bitch. After reading Richard Brody's book on Godard, funding seems especially messy and difficult every time Godard have made his films. And many of his films are about, in some ways or another, making films. Passion is also one. Jerzy the Polish film director (played by Polish actor in exile, Jerzy Radziwilowicz) is trying to make a film in the West. Taking cues from the masters of western art- Rembrandt, Goya, Delacroix in a TV studio setting, he is trying to conjure up the opening scene. The production is stalled because of some unknown lighting problems and already 4 million over budget. With civil unrest in Poland in mind and under pressure by the film's Italian financiers while keeping his German wife Hanna (luminous Hanna Schygulla) happy and entertaining the possibility of getting involved with a beguiling, Wałęsa inspired factory worker Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), Jerzy's struggling to keep everything under control. There are talks of censorship, public appeasement and subversiveness in art, in relations to those masters work and film. Is going to the USA, just like his producer and only friend (László Szabó)'s suggestion, the end of all problems or end of creative freedom?

As usual, Godard mixes up current political affairs with his lifelong examination of film medium, the rise of video technology, beauty, representation of truth in art. The usual slapstick comedy is there along with discordant soundtrack and out of sync dialog. The other Godard regulars include Michel Piccoli as the ruthless and greedy factory boss, Miriem Roussel as deaf-mute ingenue. Again, Raoul Coutard provides some beautiful images and there are so many babes/boobs in this movie. Another delicious concoction.