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Power Ballad
By the end of Power Ballad I felt like I had been emotionally manipulated all the way up a very familiar garden path. In case I’m giving the wrong impression, I also cried. On balance I’d summarise it as “John Carney does it again”, the writer/director who does other things but regularly returns to the street-musical genre that made his name with 2006’s Once (wow, 20 years ago), and then proved he wasn’t a one-trick pony with Begin Again, Sing Street and Flora and Son. Do we all like Paul Rudd? Is Rudd the everyman du jour, more handsome, funnier and nicer than we are but adjacent enough that we buy in to … Read more
Il Posto
Clear-eyed but compassionate, Il Posto is the other film by Ermanno Olmi, the one that isn’t The Tree of Wooden Clogs. Both are neo-realist to an extent and are concerned, obsessed, with the stuff of everyday life. Here, though, the focus is on the city, whereas Clogs was resolutely a tale of rural peasant life. It translates as The Job, Il Posto, and follows a young lad from the fringes of Milan, away from his traditional family and into the realm of the modern company. First he takes an aptitude test, where he’s inculcated into the world of time and motion, aptitude, the peg being created to fit the slot, rather than vice … Read more
Romería
The intimate, highly personal family drama shot in an unobtrusive, semi-documentary way is Spanish auteur Carla Simón’s speciality, and in Romería, her latest film, she stays true to her vocation. Born in the mid-1980s, Simón was orphaned at an early age and raised by an uncle. In the early 2000’s she set off on a quest to find out more about her father’s family. The story here is pretty similar – Marina (Llúcia Garcia) arrives in Vigo in the early years of the 21st century, to chase down the paperwork she needs to get her into university to study film but also to dig out information about her parents. They fell in love … Read more
The Second Twin
Who killed Oliver Lacat (Jean-Claude Rolland)? The Second Twin is a strange film that manages to fold suspect, investigator and lawyer all into one person, Pierre Montaud (Robert Hossein). Meanwhile, director Christian-Jaque’s 1966 whodunit serves up distinctive visuals as it plays with suspects, as if this were an expressionist film from the 1930s, but in searingly vivid colour. Why it’s called The Second Twin I don’t know. The original French title is La Seconde Vérité, which translates as The Second Truth, something the alternate English title, The Other Truth, gets nearer to. Is there a second twin? I don’t remember seeing one, or even a suggestion of one, but then cards are being … Read more
A Private Life
A Private Life is the “Jodie Foster speaks French shock!” movie, and it’s a funny old beast, as if the plot of Jane Austen’s Emma – the fixer who cannot fix her own life – had been re-written by Agatha Christie and then weirded-up with a plot involving past lives. Another way of looking at it is that it’s a 1940s noir, as refracted through Robert Altman’s 1970s update of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. But let’s go to cold hard facts and leave the analysis to work itself out. Foster is Lilian Steiner, a Jewish American psychotherapist based in France who seems to be having trouble keeping hold of patients. Her son … Read more
Went the Day Well?
“Do not underestimate the British” is the message of Went the Day Well?, a tea-and-crumpets piece of wartime propaganda from Ealing Studios. It begins with a unit of Germans – disguised as British Tommies – arriving in the village of Bramley End and ends with the villagers uniting to give Fritz a bloody nose. Actually, much more than a bloody nose. The violence, when it eventually comes, is all the more shocking for being out of the blue. If I tell you that the village where it was shot, Turville in Buckinghamshire, was later used as the location for cosy comedy The Vicar of Dibley and cosy crime series Midsomer Murders that’ll give you … Read more
The Marching Band
Feelgood movies often lunge for the heartstrings. The Marching Band (originally En fanfare) does so too, but there is finesse here as well, and lovely performances, plus a plot that doesn’t always go where expected. And when it does go where expected it does it so unapologetically and majestically that you might feel like applauding, or even shed a little tear. It’s soppy. It’s lovely. And it tells an interesting and faceted story. First of all about Thibaut, an orchestral conductor who collapses on the podium one day, goes to the doctor and discovers he has leukaemia. He needs a bone marrow transplant but his sister cannot oblige because, he learns, she is … Read more
Tension
If you’re buying Tension as a “physical”, it often comes packaged together on DVD or Blu-ray with Where Danger Lives, as if it were a makeweight. Strange, since it’s a cracking film in terms of plot and character. Ostensibly designed as a vehicle for Audrey Totter, it ended up with Richard Basehart’s name first in the billing – studio reasons – though in all honesty it’s Barry Sullivan who’s the standout here, excellent though Totter and Basehart are. She plays the femme fatale who’s somehow wound up married to sappy and dutiful drugstore manager Warren Quimby but who’s carrying on a not-so-secret affair with local tough guy Barney Deager (Lloyd Gough), a believer in … Read more
A Fortunate Man
The title isn’t so much ironic as a question. Is Per (Esben Smed), the hero of A Fortunate Man, actually fortunate? Or a hero, for that matter? Danish director Bille August sweats bullets to condense this adaptation of Nobel-Prizewinner Henrik Pontoppidan’s eight-volume novel Lykke-Per down to movie size. At two hours 40 something minutes, it’s a big, sweeping, historical epic of a thing, a carriage-clock movie at bottom posing a simple question: what is the good life? Pontopiddan’s eight volumes were intended as a compare and contrast to Hans Christian Andersen’s last book, the near-namesake Lykke-Peer, which was a tale of heroic struggle crowned by the ironic death of its lead character at … Read more
Rosa la rose: fille publique
A film about a sex worker who falls dangerously in love with a client, Rose la rose: fille publique has also fallen in love with its subject – life on the streets, where working girls have sex with men and like it, the girls all get along together and pimps are on the whole benign and serve a necessary purpose. Buy it? Me neither, but there is a lot to like in Paul Vecchiali’s 1986 film, which he says is influenced by the sort of films France was making in the 1930s and is dedicated to Danielle Darrieux, Max Ophüls, Dora Doll and Jean Renoir. Opening shot: Rosa (Marianne Basler), a young woman … Read more
Primate
Primate tells us what it’s all about in its opening moments – a chimp mad with rabies bent on killing the people who raised it. And then, having told us how the trick plays out, puts the rabbit back in the hat and invites us to be amazed and awed all over again even though we know what’s coming. It is a testimony to the skill of director Johannes Roberts that he pulls off the feat, relying on a different mechanism to generate tension second time around. We’re on Hawaii, the only state in America that’s rabies-free, we learn as the film goes along. Or was, anyway. And we’re in the house of a … Read more
Donkey Skin
A big thing in France but barely talked about anywhere else, Jacques Demy’s Donkey Skin (Peau d’âne), sometimes known as The Magic Donkey, possibly owes its failure to ring cultural bells globally to its plot, which is about a king trying to marry his own daughter – incest, in other words. It’s Catherine Deneuve as the daughter, trying to put the king off with one ruse after another. Jean Marais as the king, Delphine Seyrig as a fairy godmother reinforcing the young woman’s belief that sleeping with daddy is wrong, and Jacques Perrin as the prince of a neighbouring kingdom who falls for the disguised young woman after she goes on the run … Read more
