Reviews

In this haunting film, a mentally ill young woman and three of her family members - younger brother, older husband, and aging father - vacation on an idyllic island. While at first her schizophrenia seems to be in remission, family pressures trigger a rapid decline. To the grief of the rest of the family, her future prospects are dim and she, as the person they knew, may be leaving their lives forever. In the end, we are only left with a small glimmer of hope, that even though life seems cruel and unfair, the ability of people to care about each other provides an intimation that somehow things are not hopeless.

Rather than a realistic picture of clinical schizophrenia, the film primarily uses her condition to explore how people struggle with the contrast between the "magic circle" of living an outwardly normal, successful life, with the realities and forces operating apparently from the outside that threaten to destroy their tranquility. The illness of the sister represents one possibility in a life where existentially people find themselves continually in deep water, where their constructs of life are constantly threatened. Each of the family members seems poised between their social construct as a happy, nice family member, and their interior and exterior threats.

The father is an aging isolated man who poses as a serious writer tackling serious questions such as the existence of God, but who is suicidally depressed by the knowledge that his writing is pop fluff of no real significance, and that his real preoccupation is not universal issues but his personal failure as father and a husband. The son is young and naive, still living the regulated life of a student, but deeply frustrated in his desires for intimacy with women and recognition from his father. Karin, the daughter, is doll-like and cheerful on the surface, but haunted by the depressing undersurface of life, which is expressed by trenchant observations at first but then increasingly by nightmare hallucinations of wolves, owls, spiders, and voices in her head. She is sexually repelled by and emotionally distant from her older husband and prefers the company of her impressionable younger brother.

Max von Sydow, playing the husband, is the most sympathetic and normal member of the quartet, as the supportive husband. He is a stolid, kind, somewhat pompous physician who stays easily on keel with positive and normal thoughts and actions, unlike Karin and the rest of her hyper-sensitive family. However, it is implied that this feat is accomplished through lack of imagination and stubborn refusal to notice whatever isn't "fit to be noticed". The harder he tries to pull Karin back from her visionary fantasies, the more she is repulsed by what she sees as his stupidity.

Marring the film are some heavy-handed and overly theatrical moments. For example, where the father, played by Gunnar Bjornstrand, pontificates heavily to the point where suspension of disbelief is stretched, or where the Bach soundtrack comes in to underscore somewhat tediously that a moment is "profound". Related to this, the father plays a self-loathing artist who it is not hard to see as Bergman engaging in self-critique that is overly egocentric, not of general interest.

Flaws aside, this is a beautiful movie, that manages to make the most miserable family vacation ever a fascinating experience.

Adrien, the narrator and main character of La Collectionneuse, vacations at a house of a friend and patron in the south of France. He is planning to open an art gallery after years of supporting himself in a murkily defined role in the art scene, based on his connections, his personal charms, and his scheming. He is separated, perhaps permanently, from his girlfriend, a polished model beaming with positivity who doesn't take him altogether seriously. While on vacation, he shares the house with Daniel, an awkward, intense avant-garde artist with a hatred of mediocre society, and a pretty, inarticulate young drifter, Haydee. Adrien wants to center himself in a feeling of solitude in preparation for his gallery opening, but instead becomes increasingly obsessed with Haydee, who is not his type, but whose escapades with other men dent his ego. Neither Adrien nor Daniel find it acceptable to be just another in a long line of mostly mediocre men that the somewhat generic and vague Haydee finds only okay, yet they don't want to be left out either.

The tropical location and good looking leads of the film provide eye candy, but the overall message of the film is sour and bleak. However this is a bleakness and sourness that is enjoyable, revealing a psychological terrain that is realistic rather than filmic. None of the relationships pictured are profound but overall are driven by a need to score points over others or a involuntary desire for acceptance and gratification. Reunion with his girlfriend in London is less a moral triumph of true love, and more a desire for a more satisfactory ego prop.

Most striking is the anti-romance at the heart of the film. Adrien and Haydee are not dissimilar, both of them bohemian outsiders who don't take well to conformity and the 9-to-5 life, both of whom get by on their personal charm and willingness to ingratiate themselves with the more stable. However, far from finding true love together, they never really connect. Haydee's attention drifts from man to man, and Adrien is caught up in posturing to prove that he is "someone". The simple, childlike Haydee with her lack of ambitions and pretenses is not good enough for him in his mind, while to her, he is perverse and feels superior for no reason.

Two of the best moments in the film are the beginning and the end. In the beginning we are presented with Haydee. She is beautiful, young, healthy, walking on a beautiful beach. It is a perfect picture. Only, she is walking back and forth, to nowhere in particular, her face is rather plain, her haircut silly, her expression vague and dissatisfied. She's desirable but there's nothing especially "impressive" about her, hence the dissatisfaction to haunt the protagonist. Then at the end, the protagonist finds himself alone in paradise, freed from bickering. Far from being peaceful, there is a sense it is depressing. One longs to return to the happier days of unhappiness, just as Haydee expressed in her simple and seemingly stupid fashion earlier in the movie, and like the narrator is forced to admit in the end.

This is one of my favorite of the Moral Tales, feeling less talky and ultimately moralizing than most. It's a somewhat "small" film, ultimately about one man's imperfect character and his squabbles with a few others. Nothing much happens and the point seems to take the cheap shot of snarking on the egotist male protagonist. However, still, it's a movie well worth seeing and enjoyable.

In this film, an insecure, vain pop star, Cleo, waits to hear the results of a biopsy. She spends time with her maid, her lover, and her band who regard her fear of cancer as just another of her moods, and reassure her that she is young and beautiful so there is nothing to worry about. Her self-pitying mood is pushed to the edge and she sets off on her own, reconnecting with a series of people who she relates to more authentically and eventually hearing her diagnosis.

The film is brilliant in how it shows the paranoiac and isolated feelings of a person facing death unexpectedly. Everyone seems to Cleo to be staring at her. The subject of death comes up casually again and again, but suddenly it is no longer a joke to her. Faced with something as overwhelming as cancer and death, Cleo falls back on superstition and self-pity.

The singing adds an interesting element, that is both beautiful and on point. There is a scene where Cleo sings a beautiful tragic song about a woman dying of love. She is moved by the tragedy, but the irony is that she and her lover are using each other and don't have real feelings for each other. Her other songs have to do with sexy manipulative women who get whatever they want, which is ironic because while Cleo's whims are indulged, she is fundamentally childish and without a will of her own, manipulated by those around her.

Cleo's suffering seems authentic and moving, but her salvation as the film goes on somewhat less so. It is an inspiring idea that the fear of death can be overcome by moving from a shallow mentality to a state of real human connection. Unfortunately, that the idea is one one would like to be true doesn't make its presentation in the movie convincing. In particular, the end of the movie, where a brief encounter with a sympathetic young soldier seems to cure her fear of death doesn't convince. Related to this issue is the heavy-handedness in which we are reminded by voice-overs and dialogue that Cleo is childish and caught up in herself, as if it's only due to being emotionally deficient that her potential cancer is a problem at all.

Overall, a movie worth watching, well done and with an interesting subject matter. The overall premise is fascinating but there are not many particular scenes from this movie that deeply moved me or stick in my memory, so all in all not essential.

In this film, a prisoner in miserable post-apocalyptic Paris is selected by his captors based on his dreams and used in time travel experiments. He falls in love in the world of his past, watched all the while by his captors, but at the end of the experiments is marked by them for death.

The film is less than thirty minutes long and uniquely presented as a series of stills with a soundtrack and voice-over. While that might sound boring, in fact the film feels as real and gripping as a normal motion picture, while creating a unique haunting mood, half like a historical documentary and half like a dream. The protagonists drifts between the world, past or dream, where he is happy and in love, and his inescapable reality where he is blindfolded and even his thoughts are spied on. Binding it all together is the memory of an excursion to the airport as a young boy, watching a beautiful woman and then witnessing a tragedy.

If I was going to say that the film has a weakness, it's that the experimenters letting him apparently indulge himself for so long without any tangible results feels implausible. I'm of two minds about the Nazi like captors - on one hand, the mumbling in German while he's being experimented on is terrifying but, on the other hand, it feels lazy to go with an image clearly from WWII in concocting WWIII.

The movie lends itself to multiple interpretation. At first viewing, I thought the people of the future represented progress as giving up doomed emotions and desires, and the protagonist shows himself to be not enlightened. But on second, the people of the future are perhaps supposed to be creepy and unwise, an extension of his current captors with their love of technology and power, and the movie is rather representing technological totalitarianism as inescapable, except on the level of transient but meaningful emotions.

Definitely a must-see - especially at less than a half-hour to watch.

Maurice Ronet's Alain LeRoy is depressed and suicidal. A hard-drinking poseur who married a rich American woman, he is technically cured of his alcoholism, but can't bear the thought of going back to her or getting a job. He is determined to say goodbye to his friends and then kill himself, but looks for some connection to life to change his mind.

Ronet's sensitive face and physical acting convey perfectly a man besieged by humiliation and who has retreated into himself. He enunciates his metaphysical inability to care, yet every time his poverty and lack of accomplishment comes up, or he is sized up but an acquaintance or stronger, we register the emotional currents that are welling up within him and threatening to overwhelm his faint hopes.

The film leaves Alain's decision seeming horribly reasonable and yet leaves open that he does in fact simply lack patience and faith to find the good in life. Alain is fascinating by playing children, beautiful women, the bustle of life, freedom, the happiness of doing what he wanted in his younger days. But when he looks on the idea of a particular destiny as a grown man, we are made to feel his ennui. His friends have all gone off to mutually exclusive destinies and all seem to be living possibly absurd lives. One has become a nerdy academic family man who harangues him with motivational platitudes, another hangs around with druggie art poseurs, a third is a malicious rich runt who throws supper parties for people who mostly hate each other. In general, everyone's trying to be a success in some way that Alain feels is a complete front.

The difficult aspect of the movie is that we are left unsure if Alain is right or he only sees the surface. It's left open whether or not the portentous Egyptologist, for example, really is going to inspire the world with his research. We don't really know whether these successes serve anything or not. We do know that everyone seems a lot nicer and more concerned about Alain than he is about them, and that his wandering around talking about his emptiness and the emptiness of the world around him doesn't seem to serve much to help anyone. We sympathize with the main character whose problems others don't understand while at the same time feeling the frustrating aspect of his character.

The less strong side of the Fin is that the main character's self-obsession gets boring at moments. This is especially when the scenes linger too long on him talking about his unhappiness to others or himself. Similarly, it can at times get melodramatic and heavy-handed, when the main character is repeatedly demanding sympathy.

Jeanne, played by Jeanne Moreau, is a married mother and housewife in the provinces. Her husband Henri is handsome, successful, and cultured, but also an arrogant stuffed shirt who seems indifferent to her unhappiness. She has little to do and is lonely at home. To divert herself, she spends time with her shallow, trend-following friend Maggie in Paris. She begins an affair with suave high society polo player, Raoul, but is still unfulfilled.

Henri invites Raoul and Maggie over and in the course of the night, makes the two of them seem ridiculous and sows discord between them and Jeanne. Raoul in particular is revealed as a lightweight whose dedication to starting a new life with Jeanne is destroyed by Henri's bourgeois solidity and ability to make their sham marriage seem real. Meanwhile, Jeanne has gotten a ride home after her car broke down by a young handsome archaeologist, Bernard. He is abrasive and immature, but also sincere and romantic, and the two fall in love. She is able to find happiness again in loving Bernard after years of boredom, but the future of the lovers is uncertain.

Jeanne Moreau is brilliant at depicting a woman who is bored and unfulfilled, looking beautiful but not so secretly empty both in her fancy bourgeois house and in the childish diversions of Parisian fashionable circle. Alain Cuny as Henri is imposing and self-satisfied as her husband who doesn't take Jeanne seriously, feeling that he has the money and the power and is ultimately in control. Jose Luis de Villalonga as Raoul is convincing as a man who appears at first sophisticated and dapper but is actually weak and indecisive. Judith Magre as Maggy is somewhat overly comical as the shallow society friend. Jean-Marc Bory as the young lover is very handsome and with his physical presence and warm gaze and smile convey the ideas of sincerity, beauty, and natural masculinity that can spark Jeanne's happiness, although I felt that there was something lacking in his performance and chemistry with Jeanne to be totally convincing.

There is something still impressive and challenging in the movie's depiction of Jeanne abandoning everything solid in her bourgeois life and even leaving the home where her child is growing up in a search for authenticity, love, and happiness. In particular, the film feels still shocking in its refusal to condemn Jeanne with the expected moralizing ending.

The relationship between the two lovers, however, seems somewhat unmotivated and abrupt. Even though we know that Jeanne is very unhappy, and the stranger "represents" the sincerity missing from her life, nevertheless the attraction doesn't feel convincing, and it's even less clear why exactly Bernard chooses her. Bernard seems too good to be true, and one keeps expecting him to reveal himself as flaky and regretting his whim.

Then, too, the attack on bourgeois society, in the person of Henri, could be sharper. If one is young and rebellious and inclined to dislike people like Henri, the critique might seem convincing. Otherwise one might find him relatively sympathetic - true, he is not as warm and idealistic as Bernard, but arguably his practicality, stability, and respectability have as much of a role to play in society.

This is a good film that stands the test of time as interesting and worthy. Even if the sex scene in it is by no measure shocking nowadays, it still is challenging in its depiction of a passion that shocks convention. It's not at the level of later films by Malle like The Fire Within or Lacombe Lucien that feel more complex and realistic, but the focus on the feminine perspective gives it a special interest.

Ferdinand, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, is out of work, bossed around by his rich wife, and bored with his consumerist bourgeois social circle. He is interested only in literature and art, and feels unable to change his life. He falls into an affair with an old flame, Marianne, played by Anna Karina, who turns out to be mixed up in crime, and the two flee across the country. Ferdinand is bookish, self-involved, romantic, and sees everything through the lens of culture; Marianne is practical and given neither to pangs of conscience or intellectual rumination, driven by a love of adventure. They are both driven to each other and unsuited for each other. Ferdinand's running off with her from the beginning exhibits a self-destructive element, a desire to burn down his boring bourgeois life, by killing himself if necessary.

Like many of Godard's movies, the movie is the epitome of fun and cool. Both leads are charismatic, photogenic, and make life on the run seem like a desirable state. Even though the plot is basic and even archetypal, the distancing techniques and experimental aspect make it seem fun and fresh. There are musical numbers that are both fun and appropriately dramatize themes, and the same is true of, for example, the random vignette of the sailor obsessed by a tune. The use of primary colors in the set design and the images of the French Riviera are beautiful. If you like Celine, Rimbaud, etc, you may enjoy the extensive reference dropping throughout the movie.

The downside of this is that fifty years later the ironic distanced of the movie is no longer such a fresh or promising idea, when nowadays every children's animated movie uses it as an excuse to recycle material that is seen as no longer really relevant by this vagueness as to whether one is serious or not. Even though both characters are unlikable but sympathetic, nevertheless the ending lacks emotional pay-off because how detached one is from the movie that is always presented as a movie. Furthermore, do the extensive cultural references really have a pay off? I think the point might be that all these narrative models we have available to us like gangster movies, love stories, etc, have become trite, but if so, then why would making an escapist movie commenting on them at a meta-level be any better, especially when you could just not make any movie at all? Then, too, the standard French left sixties political posturing feels superficial and unsubtle.

Still, this is a fun film and has a feeling of great freedom and spontaneity to it. It is also a nostalgia film now for a bygone era where there were people who felt they were reinventing film and life, that gives one a sense of vicarious optimism and energy.

A brusque schoolteacher takes a trip out to the dunes to get away from it all by indulging his entomological hobby, hoping to get his name in the books for the discovery of a rare insect. Instead, he is entrapped by a woman who lives endlessly shoveling out the sand from her house in a pit in the dunes. Her husband has died and she needs a man to help with the work and relieve her loneliness. To the man, the life in the dunes is insufferable and absurd, and he does everything possible to escape. To the woman, the life in the dunes is all she knows and she sees little point in venturing beyond, to a wider world where she will have no significance.

The film is visually arrested in its shots of drifting dunes, struggling insects, the protagonists, sometimes covered with sand. The two main protagonists are examined in an unsentimental style, empathetically, and yet without any glamorization. We question whether they have any more hope to transcend their situation, than the insects that the man captures. The sand is a metaphor for the routine and pointless nature of the tasks of life. In the end, we are left with the question of which protagonist is closer to correct. We root for the man to escape his criminal imprisonment, feeling the ridiculousness of the situation, but at the same time it's made clear that in his real life in Tokyo, he has little more significant to await him, and that he might just as well learn to love this as anywhere else.

On the negative side, the film is long at over two hours, given the extremely spare plot and low-key approach, and grows boring. It's a film that's more fun to think about afterward than watch. In addition, on rewatching the film, the artificiality of the set up begins to wear. It is somewhat of a "one note" movie, with a didactic, Twilight Zone kind of air, where you know the sand stands for one thing, the house for another, it's all a metaphor for life, etc.

Overall, a film worth watching, but not perfect.

Marcello, played by an impassive and stylish Jean-Louis Trintignant, is disgusted with his parents, contemptuous of his fiancée, and detached from his society. His sole desire is to feel like and pass as a normal person. He volunteers in a Fascist scheme against a former professor who is engaged in opposition activity in exile in Paris. While there, an attraction to the non-conformist and sexy wife of his professor and memories of a past he would rather forget complicate his plans.

This is a movie where most of the main characters are sexy and cool and exciting, most of all the lead. Despite the supposition that Marcello is repressed and struggling to be as generic as possible, he comes across as self-aware, intense, and somewhat mephistophelian. Stephanie Sandrelli as his silly but well adapted to society wife and Dominique Sanda as his professor's intriguing, sexually liberated wife are both beautiful and entertaining. Despite that objectively the main character and his goals are ugly, the movie moves from one spectacular set piece to another amid an air of excitement.

On the other hand, this is a film that seemed more impressive to me watching when fifteen years younger. The characters motivations often seem not so much mysterious as just not making much sense. Is Marcello supposed to be in love with the professor's wife or really a homosexual? Is she really attracted to him? And then, would Marcello really go around explicitly announcing his intentions all the time if he were so "repressed"? And for the film, too, maybe it would be better not to beat the horse so much? Then to the ideas that sexual repression cause fascism feel dated, and even more so the suggestion that it's all due to his being molested. There is the sense that we're less learning something about fascism or sexual psychology as we are participating ourselves in some confused sado-masochistic / spectacular turn on.

The film is impressive but questionable if genuinely as deep as it passes for. It's a very enjoyable film that still encapsulates for me a lot of the excitement of cinema and would recommend to anyone who wants to watch a fun, cool film, but overall not really serious or a must-see except for its influence.

This is a film that bears repeated viewings. The idea of questionable identity is used to explore love and the way love feeds itself on difficulties and distance and is destroyed by availability and banality. Jimmy Stewart stars playing against type as an apparently easy- going man who becomes obsessed with Kim Novak's elegant woman obsessed with a tragic past. The film provides a character study that focuses on his attempt to reassert himself as a man after a humiliating failure at work due to an attack of vertigo, and the infantile aspects of his character particularly in relating to women.

Besides the mind-bending character of the film, it's beautifully filmed. Even as it seems to critique good old "Old San Francisco" and (then) modern San Francisco as similar to the present in cruelty and unfairness, it is also an escapist fantasy of mysterious secrets, beautiful women, plush restaurants with red interiors, wood paneled offices of shipping magnates, rolling hills, old cloisters, redwoods, etc.

The biggest flaw of the film is Jimmy Stewart. Although in some ways he is excellent in the part, implying both an "aw shucks" affable surface and a self-centered, callous, immature aspect underneath, at the same time, he is supposed to be the object of affections as well as the subject, and this doesn't seem as plausible given that he looks too old and his mannerisms are somewhat comical.

Also the psychological analysis of "vertigo" and the cartoon dream sequence both feel dated now.

This film is a "must see" but - like the ideal beauty of Scotty's dream woman - there are certain aspects that can't be dwelt on too much or it falls apart.