Our Music
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard’s newest work, which will be released in
November, is a rich, mysterious film that requires multiple
viewings. Highly formal and allusive at every level, the movie is
divided into three “kingdoms”: “Hell,”
“Purgatory,” and “Paradise.” Echoing
Godard’s other video assemblage work, the ten-minute prelude
unleashes a heart-stopping and, at points, near-abstract montage of
horrific carnage and war, both documentary and fictional. Limpid in
its quiet, disenchanted tone, the “Purgatory”
centerpiece features Godard himself lecturing on “the text
and the image” with a fleet of writers at a conference among
the postwar ruins of Sarajevo. And the refulgent coda guides us
into a serene forest that hints at uncertain resignation or
consolation. On first viewing, it appears that Godard drives this
work with less incisive emotion than he did three years ago in his
masterful In Praise of Love. Where that feature spoke in
terms of childhood and maturation and was, in many ways, a
reflection keyed to Paris, Godard has now turned more towards the
condition of the world (most acutely, Israel and Palestine) and the
place of cinema and images in a world of suffering. —Paul
Fileri
Triple Agent
Directed by Eric Rohmer
Triple Agent, Eric Rohmer’s elegant new spy movie,
serves as another piercing reminder from cinema’s talkiest
director that talk doesn’t have to be uncinematic. The
titular character and the movie’s central enigma is Fyodor
(Serge Renko), a shrewd White Russian exiled in Paris who’s
hiding his espionage activities from his Greek wife (Katerina
Didaskalou) and considering his options among the White Russians,
the Soviets, and the Nazis. If you can jump the hurdles of dense
historical allusions, this look at pre-WWII, Popular Front-era
France delivers on two levels-—as an intricate commentary on
the political intrigue of the period and as a chamber drama about a
troubled marriage. More perversely, it plays out as an action movie
with little action. Instead, we get a finely wrought series of
verbal sparring matches amounting to a study of evasion and
suspicion. As in his other forays into period pieces (The Lady
and the Duke, The Marquise of O), Rohmer applies an uncommonly
rigorous style. The result is coolly impressive. —Philip
Fileri
Tropical Malady
Directed by Apichatpong Weeresethakul
Few filmmakers are as exciting right now as the Thai auteur
Apichatpong “Joe” Weeresethakul. His fourth feature,
Tropical Malady, only furthers his reputation for formal
experimentation, exhilarating originality, and transforming vision.
This UFO presents two shorter films in one, connected by the common
theme of devouring love. The first part, unhurried and nimble in
long takes, follows the blossoming love between a soldier and a
naïve country boy. Then the light flickers; the screen goes
black. The credits roll for the second part, in which the soldier
reappears as a hunter tracking a tiger through the nighttime
jungle, encountering a talking monkey and the ghost of a cow. Joe
plunges the viewer into an absorptive space, a jungle at the
threshold of visibility suffused with a pale phosphorescence. In
the riddle of the two stories’ relation, is the
second’s leap into mythical adventure a ghostly mutation of
the preceding tale, a re-telling, or a mirror image? —Paul
Fileri
The Big Red One: The Reconstruction
Directed by Samuel Fuller
Released in 1980 in a truncated cut and out of tune with the
times, Samuel Fuller’s The Big Red One has now been
reconstructed by film critic and historian Richard Schickel,
yielding an additional 50 minutes of footage. Though the result is
more epic in length, the episodic story of a World War II infantry
squad (the First Infantry Division, dubbed “the Big Red
One”) hasn’t fallen prey to even an ounce of inflated
self-glorification. For Fuller, war is simply about surviving.
We’re plunked down with a pack of young guys (among them,
Mark Hamill and Robert Carradine), led by Lee Marvin as the
hard-bitten veteran Sergeant, as they move from North Africa to
Sicily to Omaha Beach to the liberation of a concentration camp.
Other earlier Fuller movies may be tighter works in totality, but
Fuller’s dream project since the late 1950s is a
one-of-a-kind, ramshackle potluck of unflagging energy that yokes
some of his most outrageous, off-the-cuff moments to a number of
his greatest sequences. —Paul Fileri
In the Battlefields
Directed by Danielle Arbid
Alongside bold works by higher-profile filmmakers, this
promising first feature from Lebanese director Danielle Arbid
couldn’t help but seem overly modest. Although accomplished
on its own low-key, observant terms as a coming-of-age portrait,
In the Battlefields still strikes a minor and somewhat
undistinguished note. Living in early ’80s, war-torn Beirut,
the taciturn, 12-year-old Lina (Marianne Feghali) copes with a
series of family issues as she makes tentative friends with her
aunt’s rebellious 18-year-old housemaid (Rawia Elchab).
Surprisingly, Arbid never forces the parallel between her
characters’ daily domestic unrest and the political
hostilities outside. It hangs in the background, while the film
remains content to focus on Lina’s emerging understanding of
the world. What sticks in the mind are the naturalistic
performances and bursts of Blondie and The Buzzcocks.
—Philip Fileri
Look at Me
Directed by Agnès Jaoui
The festival’s opening night selection was this droll
comedy by Agnès Jaoui about a strained father-daughter
relationship within a hypocritical haute-bourgeois Parisian
literary society. Jean-Pierre Bacri plays the father, a supremely
egotistical celebrity author, who is indulged by self-interested
colleagues but resented by his teenage daughter (Marilou Berry),
whom he scrupulously ignores. In relation to her similarly styled
debut, the enjoyable The Taste of Others, Jaoui’s
second outing proves to be a mixed bag. Bacri gets another choice
role which takes advantage of his wonderfully dyspeptic demeanor,
and many of the social observations (including constant cell phone
use) hit their mark with wit and charm. However, when the film
turns more serious, it becomes less interesting; the conventional
shape of the story shows through and Jaoui begins to rely too much
on the classical music sound track for emotion. —Philip
Fileri