In a futuristic glamour south america ruled by beautiful people a terrorist group of disabled people kidnap the goregeous daughter of one of the most powerful man of the country. they are angry! they are mad! and they are clumpsy! Gore... Bad Taste... Tragedy... absolutly hilarious

second flick from the director of
El Día de la bestia (1995) +
Perdita Durango (1997) +
La Comunidad (2000) ++
800 Balas (2004) +

very dense and formaly borderline experimental... I'll let it rest a bit before sorting my thoughts about it. For now I think it failed because of the diffusion of too many topics. But I relaize this might be the objective of a "deconstructive" aproach... (maybe the kind of thing Gobard fans would like) Unlike anything else, quite difficult to get into it, but worth a look.

a sweet comedy around marriage and family arrangements in post WW2 japan. a beautiful daughter refuses all marriage proposal because she believes she has to take care of her mother (widow). their friends and relatives will organise a large "conspiration" to marry them both, that will lead to misunderstandings between the mother and her daughter, and conflicts between the parties: 3 friends who used to be in love with the mother, when their 4th friend (whose death is honored in the beguinning of the film) married her. is it their faithful friendship to the deceased father or the nostalgic love for the moter?

Disturbing social satire of a discriminative society alienating outlandish people because they are different. Fassbinder direct deadpan performances (akind to Kaurismaki today) in tight shots with large continuity breaks. The resulting atmosphere is purposely suffocating and thought provocating. The happy ending could be regretable but it's only a parable.

All Good Citizens / All My Good Countrymen / Chronique morave

Chronicle of a community of farmers, spaning a couple of decades, in a post WW2 rural village overtaken by the communist rule, in the czech province of Moravia, before the russian occupation. A realist social drama, testimony of an epoch, when the idealism of the communism theory prompted a few men to take control of the workforce and properties for the greater good. A careful critique of this manipulative process on the verge of legality using pressure and personal threats. The wealthiest families are driven away and their farm ceized to form a kolkhoze (collective farm), although these idealists are motivated by the prosperous economic plans of the USSR, they have no practical sense to figure how to work it out. So this authoritarian power is helpless to produce proficiently as the good farmer with a traditional (and individualistic) knowledge of agriculture refuse to take part in the project. Their resistance to defend the moravian identity is an obstacle to be taken care of by force.
A handful of companions, characterized by a stereotypical trait (pronunciation impairment, thief, gipsy, greed, ambition, honesty, lust...) are put into dramatic situation when they have to make a choice, take side, make a mistake and take responsability. Coveting, suspicion, delation, murder or suicide. Notably a gipsy who divorced his jewish wife during the german occupation and drink away his remorse over her death in a camp. Or the righteous man who prefers to be sent to a rehabilitation camp than to sell his soul to communism, and insist to finish mowing his field before they take him away.
Several lyrical scenes bring poetry and irony to the otherwise rather bleak and banal narration carried out by a recurrant voiceover. Animals from the dog to the horse, pigs or geese, represent the primordial wealth of these families who rely on a good production. The music of the church choir or the bar band plays a structuring part to consolidate the community falling apart, like the allegorical paintings of the local artist or the masks of a traditional folklore.

C:+ W:0 M:+ I:+ C:++

i like the form of a mix between the real Peckar's interview and the documentary-fiction with the excellent Paul Giamatti. the comic-inspired frames and the cartoon characters add to the humor with subtlity. despite all the good technical achievment, the screenplay is slightly disappointing... is it too real or not enough dramatized? typical setup scenes kill some of the magic.
very enjoyable anyway, one of the best of the year!

Awesome homage to silent film atmosphere (texture, acting), especialy the opening sequence shot in silent with tinted crackling film and stains and hair... just like in the real thing
The rest of the film gets tiresome, introducing us to a dozen of an aristocratic crowd attending the greatest diva's funeral. The beguining of WW1 as an historical backdrop is insightful but too light.

we could read a satire of cinema or theatre itself, where characters are forced to live before our eyes on a restricted stage. and this insight is very interesting compared to todays culture of real-TV!
i especialy like the way these characters are confronted with the universe of surrealism (animals, awkward situations, word associations...) with a reaction between natural and fatalism. like if surrealism was part of daily life, and had a perfectly logical meaning to their rational minds. they do not reject surrealism, they accept the experience like a natural phenomenon and struggle to go around it with realist behavior.
the most interesting angle of the film is how the guests almost refuse to face the root of their failure. nothing block the way out : the spell is invisible, immaterial. we dont even know if there is actually a spell on them. like u imply, maybe it's them who didnt want to live (a psychoanalysis point of view : voluntarily failed acts, bad faith, denial of self responsability)
the problem is so simple that they could just walk out. and when they try, they not only walk back in, but they spell out a verbal justification to explain why they didnt want to walk afterall. like if they refused to say they couldnt make it. is it about bravery, individualism, fear of the outside world, fear to be singled out, fear to be a hero, fear to leave the group, to leave society? they cannot admit they couldnt do it, and instead of sharring their experiences and rationalizing them, to find at what point their free will to leave collapses, they ignore their weakness and make it an absolute evil that has nothing to do with them. they even blame the host to cast a curse on them... like if voodoo magic was a more rational explaination.
i like to draw parallels with Audry's Huis Clos (1954) from Jean Paul Sartre's novel and screenplay.
it is a metaphysic play of an abstract purgatory : a closed room fully furbished, where strangers are taken to wihtout knowing how they got there, and will try to figure where they are, why them, and how to get out. existentialist questions about death and guilt.
"huis clos" is also a label we give to a sub movie-genre that means unity of place. a drama that takes place between 4 walls, with a limited number of characters, and no outside world influence, to focus on character development. i am very found of these films. i dont know what is the english equivalent. (Persona, Dogville, Festen, Reservoir Dogs, Midnight Express, Cries and Whispers, Woman in the Dunes, Rear window, Kurosawa's High and Low, La Règle du Jeu for instance are good examples of huis clos film) and also Jan Nemec's The Party and the Guests where bourgeois guests at a wedding party are kidnapped by a quirky character in the woods through psychologic manipulation and torture. they are forced without physical violence to stay put in an invisible room virtualy created by foot-drawn lines in the gravels. the political subtext of this czech farce is quite powerful too.

Inspired by Griffith's Orphans of the storm, Rohmer used the same static shots for studio-exteriors in the crowded Paris. Pushing the abstraction to set his characters in hand-painted postcards backgrounds, with hi-contrast colors. Based on the diary of an english aristocrat lady who lived the dark hours of the post-revolution Commune period when the people beheaded the royal family.

i wouldnt go so far as to say it's a perfect 10 tho... but the editing and pictural storytelling is totally innovative and inspirating for cinema! i like your presentation of the questions left behind by the jigsaw, and the inspiration for a film like Mulholland Dr. is obvious. Who is who? who lies? who tells the truth? did it happen? or is it a vision of what could happen?
the mirror images multiply the possibilities, and switch to flashbacks, several simultaneous viewpoints, alternative scenes of the same event, all mighty voice over dictating the construction of images on screen, detail after detail.
i'd like to give credit to the author of the original novel : Alain Robbe-Grillet, who was one of the writers (Samuel Beckett, Michel Butor, Marguerite Duras) who invented the "nouveau roman" (new novel). a literary generation of the 50ies/60ies in France (similarily to Sartre, Breton, Valery, Céline, Bataille, Queneau, Vian or in english Joyce, Faulkner, Virginia Woolf), breaking off with the traditional novel:
-denial of the romanesque illusion, of the character psychology, and of the trustful relationship with the reader.
-anti-humanist. against realism, existentialism, mimetism, pedagogy, engagement, politics...
-development of the conter-illusion : deconstruction of the plot structure, the writting becomes the foremost subject, the novel is a never-ending experimentation.
of course this literary movement was perfect for cinema Avant Garde experimentation to develop, and Resnais was the best to adapt this novel.
the film is very long, and the lack of coherance doesnt help to go through the end. but the film is beautifuly photographed in greyish shades of B&W (or was it the faded out aged copy?), swang by haunting music, among fancy dresses and refined furniture of an imperial palace.
the editing is outstanding, full of tricks and inventions, playing closely with the soundtrack synchro/asynchro.
the lead trio is terrific, mysterious, intriguing, disturbing. the Woman : A is Delphine Seyrig (in Muriel also)

interesting turn in Allen uninterrupted flow of Allen's self representation. Jason Biggs as Woody's successor was a nice try but it's not fully convincing... now we have a double Woody on screen : one senile, one juvenile. doh! the youngster gives Woody's usual punch lines and neurotic gimmicks. the content is better than the average Allen's thematic, but could be more focused on the "can't live with/can't live without" relationship. the post 9/11 bitterness, at the same time lightly ridicule and deeply cynical, comes across with the right weight suitable for the absurdity of the situation. what else to say? Christina Ricci is HOT!!!! and is worth the watch if nothing else

brand new print restored by Pierre Lhomme its cinematographer. french DVD out in march.
What an extraordinary film! 3 years after Resnais' La Guerre est finie, it depicts the very same claustrophobic solitude of the underground spy network, but this time under the WW2 german occupation, adaptating in a full story Joseph Kessel's best seller (which was only a patchwork of unrelated short stories). Both Kessel and Melville took part in the Resistance themselves, and the anti-dramatic/anti-romanced realism is telling. The film ignores totally the larger scope of the war, and focuses exclusively on the daily lives of a handful of agents crossing the borders undercover to move material and carry out missions. Outstanding interpretations, minimalist, stylized, by Lino Ventura and Simone Signoret (ironically she has been married to Yves Montant who leads in La Guerre est Finie), who underplay their star ego. The film is slow paced and emphasis on dead moments in-between action. No happy ending, except for the noble spirit of the french resistance.

the film is beautiful, and has an idealist preaching tone, like a biased documentary, or a vernacular fable. the photography is magnificent finding beauty in what is left of a ghost of a country devasted by both Talibans and the UN coalition!
IMHO, the ruins are too cute, like if nothing happened. apart from the bullet holes in the walls, and the houses torn apart, i didnt feel the violence of war, the pain of the families, the wounds of the society. all they seem to complain about is the blasphems of fundamentalist religion infringments by women new liberties, the rest (thirst, hunger, homelesness, refugees, missing persons, mines) are already part of daily life, unfortunately.
i think she should have described violence in a more present manner. i believe 1 year is not enough to wipe it off their memories, and their lives. no mention of carpet bombings, mere mention of the exiting taliban regime, insignificant mention of foreign army "occupation", forgetful mention of Bin Laden and the Mollahs who initiated this mess, total silence about the tribal civil war that fire up the entire Afghanistan (outside Kabul : lone city protected by the soldiers).
this is definitely not a political documentary. that is why i call it a fable. a fable about the hope of women who discover the hope to access position none of their peers ever enjoyed before. ("naive" like u say)
but can u really treat such a sensible subject with so much missing key facts of history?
maybe too optimistic, as frankly none of this is going to ever change in decades... i understand this movie, like her short in 11'09"01 - September 11, is didactic to educate the locals with basic information, and look pretty to the western intellectuals fond of muslim cinema.
this said, the movie is well warped up and the story of htis family gathers all the issues bore by the afghani people: losses, religion, starvation, refugees, women conditions, education.
the radical fundamentalists who STILL rule the spirit of this people, not just the elite, most of the people is behind this strict laws. the Coran says:
-women shall not dance, to hide their beauty to men.
-women shall not interact with a stranger.
-If women really have to speak, they shall stick a finger in their mouth to distort their voice and sound not like a woman.
-Men shall turn away their eyes if they encounter a women uncovered.
-if your wife refuses herself to you at night, you shall not share your bed with her and beat her.
-a woman shall not work or study.
Samira Makhmalbaf makes a case about religion instead, and pursue her work to promote liberation of women in muslim countries. which is as good of a quest, because changing mentalities will take time and efforts.
The discussion with the french soldier is only truth. And i have to admit this "alien" political deabte in english between a french soldier who doesnt want to take position about his country (a good mindless soldier like in any army), a wannabe afghani president who happens to be a woman young and full of illusion about politics with naive questions about western democracy, and a refugeed poet from Pakistan, was both surrealist and insightful!
Chirac (current french president) was really elected (including the votes of the opposition that expressed a "none of the above, least bad" option) to dump his contender : an extreme right-winged fascist who got lucky to pass the primaries* for internal competition inside the major parties.
So to throw back in our face (i.e. France, or any western country) the "near-failure" of our system, when we broke into their homes to ENFORCE democracy although they are not ready to get rid of religious fundamentalism, was very clever, and a "nasty" jab at the "politicaly correct" foreign aid.
if the characters seem feelingless, apathic and fatalist, this fable is still worth watching for a lesson from one of our mistakes. to learn more about people before we impose an unfit model that isnt even working at home.

Au hasard Balthazar = At random, Balthazar.
"hasard" means "random", but i think the most appropriate term would be "chance", or "haphazard".
"by chance, Balthazar" rather than a aimless/freedom/carelessness for his destiny, i believe the title means the overwhelming fatality of his fate, and all he'll make of his life is subject to luck and fortunate/unfortunate coincidences. which u very well develop in your review however. i just wanted to note this comment on the title. the funny title is of course quite ironic, considering the tragedy of the film.
Balthazar is also the name of one of the wise Kings who came to honor the birth of Jesus Christ, following a star in the sky, through the desert, up to Bethlehem, birthplace of Jesus. there was also a donkey in the stable where Maria gave birth to Jesus. and the heroin of this story is named Marie.
this reference is followed up by the christening of the baby donkey.
i have another interpretation of the donkey's tail fire... i had the feeling Gerard wanted to get rid of Balthazar, because he was jealous of his relationship with Marie. Gérard thought if Balthazar ran away from the town, Marie would be on her own, and he could comfort her and keep her for himself.
the scene shows Gérard throwing away the bread he's supposed to deliver, so obviously he doesnt care much of his job, he's a slack, lasy, unmotivated, why would he be worried about the donkey's slowness?
after Balthazar runs futher away with his tail in fire (is it a wink at Alan Alexander Milne' Eeyore in Winnie the Pooh? ), Gérard moves on the other errands. i believe the films cuts to another scene, and it's only later, that Gerard comes back to fetch Balthazar who waited right there off the road. or is it not like this?
i thought Marie was just a b!tch...
she's set to represent the audience's identification, because she's so nice and her life is unfair... but gradualy we notice how wrong we were to sympathise/empathize with her, because she took a couple of bad decisions in her life : blaming her father, rejecting Jacques, following blindly Gérard, abandonning Balthazar, selling herself... of course the point of the film is to show how life is dreadful for some people, who have very little leeway to escape their fate. Marie is the victim of a generation, of a society, of lots of issues that exlains her failure. She believed in freedom and all she got in return wasnt praise and blessing for trying (like in any happy ending studio movie), she got pain and misery snowballing in her life, pulling her away from her parents and her potential future.
the film does begin and end on Balthazar, not Marie.
i like the way Bresson doesnt try to humanize Balthazar, with human reactions, instead he's really an animal, almost expressionless, internalizing everything like if he was unaffected. it is very different from the usual film with an animal hero.
this kind of treatment is a slap in the face for our identification into him. it's quite interesting in this regard, as a statement of the director against a certain tradition of cinema, promoting his very own minimalist and realist way of filming.

A college girl, national diving champion, has an accident in the pool. When she miraculously walk again, she has strange powers that allow her to see matter and energy in the universe. 2 boys, her friends, try to understand the mystery surrounding her and the landing of 2 simulatanneous meteorits annoucing the unexplained curse of the stones, that make people suddenly fall like a stone in the street. This curious disease can only be cured by the pagan rite of street water-sprinkling.
There are interesting new-age theories but are underdevelopped leaving the plot on a very shallow level. Nice shots of nature, water, steaming asphalt in the street during the dry season, and the diving competition.

3 couples from different social class and different culture face the same unspoken problem of intimate violence that is hidden from relatives or even ignored by the husbands themselves. Women are victims of molestation or psychological pressure even in wealthy and educated background.
One young couple is from Bosnia, the wife doesnt speak german and wind up helpless, homeless, her children taken away from her because her pathologic-jealous husband can't stand her gynecologist touch her, he just deny her.
A middle-aged couple with 2 young girls from 2 different father. The father is violent with his wife, humiliates her, and eventualy rape her.
the grown up child, newly wed, of an old couple fails to notice the distress of his mother, the disfunctionality of their couple. The husband broke his wife's arm, and nobody cares. The wife ashamed refuses to complain.
All 3 women will be helped and comforted by the center for assaulted women that takes care of them legaly and psychologicaly, to protect their rights and their health.
Nina Kusturica (not related), is born in Mostar, Bosnia, in 1975, lived in Sarajevo, and moved to Vienna, austria, since 1992, where she studied Cinema. This is her final student film, from a script by Barbara Albert. A promotional film commanded by the Society Against Molested Woman.
She was attenting a film festival on austrian cinema this week in Paris, and looked pretty confidente, with a solid mastering of style and technique! She explained the very special austrian law recently voted : if a woman calls the police on her husband he is expelled from his home by the police for 10 days. The police comes back 24h later to check if the man didn't come back, or if the woman is hiding him, she could be prosecuted for not respecting teh law (!). The punishment can be extended to 1 month or a rehab training A.A.-style.

i finally got to watch this monument. my 3rd Antonioni, and the best. it's very slow to start and very dull untill... the course of events reverses and the characters switch sides. it's always hard to interpretate a story when there are so much loose ends in a film, far from being an issue this makes the film more mysterious and disturbing, purposely. obviously the story, the narration and the suspens is not the main concern of Antonioni, who explores what is going in people's mind (as much with his characters than with the audience) while they are expecting an answer, the resolution of a mystery, the disappearance of a doubt...
likewise the actors performance is uneventful, and unsurprising... very stereotypical reactions and dialogs, but set in a quite fascinating desertic places. Monica Vitti is gorgeous tho :)
at the end of the day, it's like nothing ever happened in their lives, no dramatic changes, no tragedy... all lies in the silences of remorse and the self control of hidden weaknesses.
Some good plans, but overall a very classic cinematography, only colder and more distant.