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| Danny Huston (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| Français : Gérard Depardieu au festival de Cannes (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| English: Michael Haneke Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| Jean-Louis TRINTIGNANT, french Actor & Comedien (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| English: Fabrice Luchini, French actor Français hoto credit: Wikipedia) |
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| Chiwetel Ejiofor at the premiere of Redbelt at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
In recent weeks I have been watching a lot of movies, most
of them by logging on to Netflix, which is offering so many good movies at the
minimal cost of less than $8 a month, that I spend quite a lot of time scolling
through their offerings before being able to make up my mind which one I want
to see.
Some of the best movies I have seen have not been what I
would call enertaining. I am thinking here particularly of two French
offerings, one called Amour directed
by Michael Haneke, which tells the beautifully-acted but harrowing tale of two
elderly people, musicians, one of whom, the wife, played with extraordinary
veracity by 85-year-old Emanuelle Riva,
unfortunately declines into an illness that looks very much like what we have
come to know as Alzheimer’s disease.
The husband, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, is a model
of patience as he watches his wife become virtually unrecognizable, and he
adjusts his own pattern of life to what is inevitable --- he has to look after
her. He betrays impatience only when outsiders, like his daughter, come in and
airily criticize things he may or may not have done, to which his
understandable response is that they might like to undertake the job
themselves, at which point they hastily withdraw. This movie has a tragic
denounement; I can hardly call it an ending, because in fact, after a dramatic
event which surely must have had legal repercussions, nothing further happens.
The movie just fades out, but even this lack of a satisfactory ending did not
prevent this movie from gathering almost every award on offer, including the
Academy Award for best foreign picture in 2012. Although this is a
French-language film, it was in fact a French, German and Austrian
co-production.
The second French film that provides a powerful, though
slightly unpleasant experience is called The
Kreutzer Sonata, directed by Bernard Rose, and based on a short novel by
Leo Tolstoy. It is basically a study of the unreasonable jealousy of a husband
who resents his wife’s musical partnership with a vioinist, with, as often happens in real life in such situations,
tragic results. The actors here are Danny Huston, with whom Rose has previously
worked on a couple of films, and Elizabeth Rohm as the wronged wife. I say it
was a sightly unpleasant experience, because to watch jealousy at work is a
terrible thing and this movie plumbs the depths of this terrible emotion.
A third French offering that I personally liked, although
I have heard negative criticisms of it was called My Afternoons with Marguerite. It is a very simple story of a shambling
middle-aging man, played by Gerard Depardieu, scraping up an acquaintance with
a 95-year-old woman whom he meets on a park bench almost every day, and comes
to care for. It is a rather strange meeting, the Depardieu character having
little learning and few skills, but plenty of goodwill, while the old woman is
a retired scientist well versed in books and information. At first she reads to him but later as her
eyesight declines, he begins to read to her, and when she is forced out of her
comfortable old folks’ home, her new friend rushes to find her and rescue her
from the poor class of home into which uncaring relatives have consigned her.
Perhaps the most enjoyable of these four French films
however, Bicycling with Moliere was delightful not only for a stellar
acting performance by veteran actor Fabrice Luchini, but for the magnificent
settings, superbly photographed, of the Ile de Reh, a small island off the west
coast of France, a few mies north of the Gironde estuary, to which place a
famous old actor, played by Luchini, had retired after tiring of his
profession. His uncle had left him a
slightly dilapidated house into which he had fitted like a comfortable glove.
Routinely he burned any scripts sent to him, and when Lambert Wilson, playing a famous leading actor
in a soap opera, comes to visit him, the contrast between the two actors could
not have been greater. The matinee actor,
who had worked with the older man years before, wanted to perusade his friend to
return to the stage in a play by Moliere, Le
Misanthrope.
At first reluctant to even think about it, the older man
finally agrees to readings of the play (which he knew almost by heart anyway),
both tantalysing the younger man with the possibility that he might agree, and then
reducing the idea to farce. The younger man had a scheme to have them alternate
the roles, something the older man never agreed to, not quite at least, and as
one reviewer said, the film shows this effort of the two actors to come to a
decision without tearing each other to pieces. The dialogue, written by
Phillipe Le Guay, the director, was sparkling, amusing and enthralling to watch
as the two got into repeated sparring matches.
But just when the visitor thought he had the old man in
the bag, he capriciously announced he
would never agree to share the role, insisted on being the star, and if his visitor
didn’t like it, he could lump it. A beautiful
film enhanced by the splendid scenery of the island --- perhap not so much the
scenery, as the texture of the buildings, lovingly photographed and lingered
over.
Another film that can hardy be described as entertaining is 12 Years as a Slave, which seems set to
mop up at the Academy Awards in March. This ia a magnificent story about a black
man, born free and living in New York, who is kidnapped and taken into slavery,
from which he is unable to escape for12 years. It is based on an autobiographical
book by a man to whom this actually happened. And the scenes of how he was treated
leave the audience in no doubt as to the cruelty, indeed, the utter brutality
of the slave system as it operated to form the foundation of the United States economy.
The film has been directed by Steve McQueen
with an intensity that cannot surprise anyone who saw his previous epic on the
imprisonment and death of the Irish prisoner Bobby Sands. Its star Chiwetel Ejiofor, a British actor of
Nigerian parentage, certainly filled the screen: when it was over I felt I had
been dragged through a gooseberry bush, so compelling was its story.
I should also mention a couple of good documentaries: Orchestra Of exiles records the tenacious determination of Bronslaw
Huberman, a leading Jewish musician from before the last world war, who conceived
the apparently impossible idea of gathering the best Jewish musicians n the
world into an orchestra in Israel, as much as a demonstration of defiance of
the lunatic ideas of
Adolf Hitler, as in an effort to save them all from the gas
chambers. The second notable documentary
was called Sins of My Father, dealing
with the successful effort of the son of Mexican drug czar Pablo Escobar to
contact, as a gesture of reconciation, the sons of some of his most important
victims
In a third categoy I must mention a Kazakstan film Tulpan, more like a documentary than a
feature film, but telling a story of unrequited love of a young man in search
of a wife on the unforgiving steppes of that country. Quite unlike any movie I
have ever seen, it nevertheess had the grip and feel of real life about it.
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