(contains spoilers) This film, whose title means "Good bye, Children" is a semi-autobiographical film (directed by Louis Malle) about a Catholic boarding school during the Nazi occupation of France and the tightening noose around the Jewish boys the school is harboring. The war and the fact that the Germans are losing it is making matter all the worse for the boys. They are crammed into a large common room for meals and into large rooms full of beds. They are as boys will be, horrible to one another, calling each other names, stealing things from each other, bartering for cigarettes with the crippled boy servant who works with the cook. The food is bad and the rooms are cold. Nevertheless this is where the children of affluent French parents sent their boys to school.
It is a claustrophobic world made even more so by the Nazi occupation and the Milice, who are French collaborators who do the lower level policing in the community. The boys are finally betrayed when the crippled boy servant is fired for stealing and in response he reports the school to the Gestapo. The school is closed and the three Jewish boys (or at least the ones they know about) and the Priest who is responsible for this concealment are led away. A voiceover explains that all of them die later in concentration camps.
It is thus a heartbreaking story of young boys whose lives are cut short at the brink of adult life, with its widening vistas of knowledge, action, and possibility, the uneven transition between the childish and the very serious, the comic and the tragic. It was a great film, but I am not sure I enjoyed watching it all that much.
Seven (1995). As characters in film, neither Kevin Spacey nor Brad Pitt have been known for being paragons of sanity. Pitt has played lunatics very convincingly from "Twelve Monkeys", "Fight Club", to "Legends of the Fall" among just the few I can think of. Spacey has been in some truly weird shit too, like "K-Pax", "The Life of David Gale" and of course "American Beauty". Here Spacey takes the prize however while Pitt is only a distant runner up. Meanwhile Morgan Freeman stands by like God shrugging, as if saying things like "What fools these white folks be".
Freeman and Pitt play two police homicide detectives in a thoroughly nasty urban environment where it is raining constantly. While Freeman is on the cusp of retirement and about to turn his back on this whole unpleasant business, Pitt is the brash younger guy who chose to serve in the crime toilet Freeman exists in, in this precinct. Meanwhile Pitt's pretty wife (Gwyneth Paltrow) sits at home a little distressed by it all but standing by her man. She is rather peripheral to the plot until things come to a head in the last act.
Anyway a serial murderer is on the loose, and the murders are as elaborate as they are bizarre, each one seemingly to illustrate one of the seven deadly sins. For example a very fat man is force fed until he literally explodes, a corporate lawyer is murdered of a weekend at his office and to ensure that investigators don't miss the point the word "Greed" is spelled out in the man's blood on the plush carpet. Meanwhile the perp, played by Spacey taunts them. Indeed this takes the Zodiac murders one better. This is like Dirty Harry on steroids, and murder as performance art.
I didn't much care for this film mainly because it seemed pointless except as a vehicle for the ghoulish special effects. The detectives spent too much time shining their police flashlights into dark corners and really getting nowhere until they remember that class they took on medieval Christian philosophy, and who woulda thought THAT would come in useful? You never know.
Forget Paris. (1995) This was Billy Crystal's follow-up to the big hit "When Harry Met Sally" and involves a professional basketball referee who is in France only because his dad's dying wish was to be buried with his army buddies who were not so lucky in the D-day invasion of Normandy. There Crystal is smitten with the American Airline agent (Debra Winger) who has the unenviable task of informing him that the airline lost his father, casket and all. Their love affair is recounted by some old friends of Crystal's character at restaurant in a series of flashbacks in a manner similar to Woody Allen's "Broadway Danny Rose". The love affair has its ups and downs and is moderately funny. It is the perfect date flick, because, frankly one could expect your date to be in a good mood once it was over, unlike Seven.
La nuit Americaine or Day for Night (1973) is the story of the production of a feature film and is one of Francois Truffaut's greatest films. It is a story of the lives of the actors, producers, and technicians as they make a feature film. If you are a cinema nerd, then this is the film for you, because you get to see a lot of the artifice behind the making of films. Truffaut plays the director of the film, a role which must have been for him very easy to play. He is the emotional rock upon which the various actors in their various complicated lives cling with various degrees of success. One actor, Alphonse, is having an affair with one of the technicians, who suddenly dumps him and disappears with the stunt man (whose work with the film was done) to England. Alphonse then proceeds to seduce the female lead and then calls up her husband and asks her to "release" her. The result is that the female lead has an emotional breakdown and won't come out of her dressing room.
Another actress has a drinking problem and can't remember her lines, and the male character opposite her is killed in an auto accident late in the filming. While the insurers hover, the script is modified so that they can work around the death, and continue with the film as if nothing much has happened.
It's a delightful, entertaining and unique sort of film. I would highly recommend it.
(Note: Contains spoilers)
For some reason I had some trouble at the start remembering which was Jules and which was Jim. Jules (Oskar Werner) was the German and Jim (Henri Serre) was the Frenchman. They are lifelong friends who meet as young men in the years before the First World War. All of this is told so rapidly that it is hard to both read the subtitles and look at the action on the screen. I guess that's my fault for not knowing French, but it is hard not to learn some French when watching this film.
They are both involved vaguely in literary and journalistic work but not much else is shown of their professional lives. What the film focuses on is their extraordinary relationship with a woman named Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) over a period of years.
These years span the years immediately prior to the First World War, and fifteen years after it. Jules and Jim are irresistably drawn to this luminous and unstable personality, Catherine. After an initial period where everyone is footloose and fancy free in Paris with romps in the countryside and races on footbridges. There is no hint of darkness except when, walking home from a play, Jules with insensitivity launches into a disquisition on how awful women are, and Catherine impulsively jumps into the river in protest. Then the War breaks out, and Jules, in the German army and Jim is in the French army. Jules is so concerned that he might shoot Jim if he fights on the Western front, that he opts to fight on the Eastern Front instead. In the event, however, they both come through the war unscathed and pick up where they left off.
While Jim has Gilberte, his long-suffering beau, Jules takes Catherine off to live with him in Germany where they create and procreate. She bears him a daughter, Sabine, and helps to illustrate his book on insects. He talks of writing a novel with insects as characters. Jim soon comes to stay with them and they become as it were a menage a trois.
It is by this time that we know that all is not right in the marriage of Catherine and Jules. Catherine keeps having outside affairs and in other ways seems increasingly unstable. Catherine fixes on Jim and then relapses to Jules, when she isn't going off to cavort with Albert, who is the occasional fourth wheel. This is a woman whose manic energies make her very attractive to men but in a direction that clearly (as the story proceeds) insanity lies. While Jim vacillates between marrying Catherine and going back to Gilberte, Jules, the cuckolded husband, clings to the scraps of what is left of his marriage, afraid apparently to move on. Catherine seems increasingly unstable, driving recklessly and in one scene (that seems to be repeated in "Day for Night" circling through a paved city square aimlessly and blaring her horn. Finally Catherine summons Jim to her side. When, at last fed up with her, he coldly dismisses her and announces he is going to marry Gilberte, she takes a gun and announces her intention of shooting him. He managed however to get the gun away from her and escapes. A while passes and things are seemingly back to normal.
Somewhat inexplicably, they meet up in a cinema while watching a newsreel of Nazis burning books. Everything seems to be back to normal, as if nothing has happened. They are sitting together, ruminating over the unsettling events in Germany when Catherine invites Jim to go see something in her car. They go driving off and begin crossing a bridge with an obviously missing span. Jules looks up and see what is happening but cannot stop it. Catherine and Jim fall into the river and drown. Then in a rather grisly scene that mirrors that of the Nazi book burnings, Jules arranges for them both to be cremated (and the viewer is not spared even the sight of the coffins burning in the furnace but also the sight of the burnt fragments being crushed up and placed in the urns). Jim has them placed together in niches in a mausoleum and then he shuffles on home from the cemetery.
The ending certainly came as a shock. Death usually does come as a shock, especially accidental death or death by design. I mean there you are, having a day, and suddenly you die. It wasn't as though Jim wasn't warned, especially by the scene where she pulls a gun on him, but clearly it wasn't enough to keep him away. The moth and the flame. The early scene in which she packs vitriol (concentrated Sulfuric Acid) for the eyes of men who lie, is also indicative that she isn't quite all there.
But this is how you end stories, and death is as good a way as any. The story was based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Henri-Pierre Roché. Stories are like that, you've had a nice ride, but now it's time to get off, so the characters end up doing something decisive and it's over. Otherwise of course you would be following Jules and Jim and Catherine into old age. It is hard to find any sympathy for Catherine, at least to my mind. She is the inevitable crazy, oversexed woman that some men are drawn to. I do not think that long term relationships with women or men is impossible, but that for some men or women it is.
