French Cinema: The Army of Crime (2009)

What would you do if you were a nice family of Parisian Jews, communists, Spaniards, Italians, Armenians, living as political and religious refugees from other parts of Europe, and you found yourself suffering once again
under the thumb of the Nazis and their collaborating stooges?  What if you found your family terrorized by thugs, and rounded up for being Jews and sent to death camps in other parts of Europe?   You would raise hell.  This film, drawn from historical events known as the Affiche Rouge is the riveting account of how this resistance cell was born and how with grim inevitability, it passed into history.  

The group was led by Missak Manouchian, an Armenian Communist who had already seen at close hand the lesser known genocide against the his own people in Turkey.   At first they were independent and freelance, shooting a soldier here an officer there, and the occasional bombing of a wine and cheese party or brothel,    but they were later organized with outside help towards more ambitious acts of terrorism.

  Missak chooses to lead them and reluctantly begins to join in the slaughter against his own personal ethics against killing.  Incredibly, two of the young men most intimately involved in the killing continue to pursue their academic careers and participation in a swim team, his lovely ginger-haired Jewish girlfriend engaging in playful banter at the poolside. 

In a slow motion tragedy the boy comes home having just missed having his whole family being transported to Auschwitz, while his girlfriend, also having missed the excursion ends up selling herself to a French collaborator in order to save herself from the same fate, in exchange for personal survival and vague and empty promises to ensure the safety of her family.

When Missak's higher up, a Soviet Agent urges him to increase the visibility of the targets because of the lack of play in the French papers, he reluctantly goes after an SS general.  This is successful but brings down the full wrath of the Third Reich upon his group.  The resulting dragnet, apprehensions, tortures and interrogations, and show trial were given great publicity by the Nazis and Vichy who tried to make the 23 tried and executed into poster children for the sinister influences of foreign communists and Jews. Instead, they became a rallying point for still further acts of resistance, as history showed. 

This was an excellent film, told with great sympathy and stark realism.  I found it a gripping story, and I could scarcely pull myself away once the story got rolling to its sad ending and epilogue. 

Books: The Fires by Joe Flood (2010)

The subtitle of this book is "How a computer formula, big ideas, and the best of intentions burned down New York City- and determined the future of Cities."   I found this book a fascinating look at the relatively recent history of New York, and how, focusing on the New York City Fire Department, it demonstrates eloquently how public policy can go so disastrously wrong.  In a period from the mid 1960s to 1980, New York and especially blighted areas such as the South Bronx became the unwitting guinea pigs for a series of highly sophisticated plans to save money and at the same time improve fire protection in a massive city with an aging infrastructure.  The changes were equal parts wishful thinking, academic arrogance, and decisions made at a far remove from the grim reality on the ground.  

To begin with there are some descriptions of some memorable

The Waldbaum's Fire, 1978

urban fires that demonstrate vividly how truly dangerous the work of a fireman can be.  The Waldbaum's Supermarket fire of August 2, 1978, which is described in the opening of the book is a vivid example.  This was in Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn.   There cheap construction and the concealment within the building superstructure of a fire trapped beneath the ceiling and the false double roof led to an explosion and collapse of the roof of the building, and the deaths of six firemen.  It was one of the worst losses of firemen in New York Fire Department history, which was made even worse by the deliberate decision to delay the second alarm until after 9 a.m. when the next shift would go on duty as a way of saving on overtime pay.  That is, because the fire took place at the very end of a shift, a serious fire could cost the department a lot of overtime pay.

In the mid 1970s the city of New York had a serious budget problem.  The decay of poorer neighborhoods, the escalating racial tensions of areas such as Harlem, and the Bronx, and the high handed approach of city planners such as

Robert Moses

Robert Moses in the building and reshaping of the city of New York led inexorably to the financial crisis in which it found itself in the mid 1970s.  White flight to the suburbs, a worsening crime and housing epidemic and the driving out of an industrial tax base in certain parts of the city, along with generous labor contracts to public safety workers led inevitably to a budget crisis and near bankruptcy in the 1970s.  Fire prevention cost money and the need for fire prevention fell disproportionately on poorer neighborhoods in older and more fire susceptible buildings.   At the same time the need to balance the budget for public safety led to cutbacks on protection and how these cutbacks were implemented made matters even worse. 

Enter the RAND corporation.  As a non-profit think tank it began shortly after the second world war to work in areas of defense and strategy.  It later branched out into other governmental areas as diverse as criminal justice, social welfare, urban problems, and even arts policy.    Its forte was mathematical analysis, game theory, and modeling of complex problems.  Unfortunately for the mathematical modeling done for New York City fire protection, it gave a scientific cover for a nonsensical public policy wherein fire companies were closed in the areas that most needed the protection.

The South Bronx

As the south Bronx began to burn some accused the city government of racism and bias against the poorest neighborhoods, but all they had to do was point to the mathematical modeling that the RAND corporation had done for them to dispel this notion.  The decline in fire protection in the the late 1970s led to the wholesale destruction of many buildings and leaving the place half empty with large gaps in the landscape.    Some policy wonks even suggested that they should bulldoze the rest and rebuild the place completely. 

John Lindsay

This took place during the mayoralties of John Lindsay (1966-1974), Abe Beame (1974-1977) and Ed Koch (1978-1989).   Lindsay was a Kennedy-esque figure who was swept into office on a reformist wave in 1966.  Though a Republican he was, as most Republicans are in New York, merely Liberals who chose to run against Tammany Hall.  Lindsay brought in the same "Whiz Kids" from RAND corporation that Kennedy had introduced with Robert McNamara in the Department of Defense. 

John T. O'Hagan

At the same time, young, energetic John T. O'Hagan rose to become fire commissioner.  It was a high point in the faith in scientific idealism applied to public policy to fix the problems of government. 

People and large organizations have often been deluded by their intellectual arrogance.  One cannot from a brilliant hypothesis create fact without first putting it to the experiment.  After the experiment conclusions are drawn, not before. 

Joe Flood

And it is also true that an experiment is best done on a small scale before investing huge amounts of resources to changing things on a large scale, but this fact seems to have escaped the powers that existed in New York City.  The budgetary crisis notwithstanding, they should have known better.

 

Blame it on Fidel by Julie Gavras (2006)

It isn't easy being a kid.  You are a hostage to the whims of your parents and for the lead character in this story this couldn't be more true.   Little Anna de la Mesa, whose father is an emigre Spanish communist and whose mother is a radical feminist, leave their good jobs to join the movement, live communally and struggle for world revolution.  It is 1972-73, when Franco was still dictator of Spain and Salvador Allende has become a popularly elected Communist President of Chile.  Meanwhile Anna is attending Catholic School where she gets the usual Church indoctrination and being the usual materialistic little kid hates the decline in her parents material fortunes and all the strangers that seem to come and go in their smaller home. 

Her mother's parents, who are wealthy, naturally disapprove of Communists and tell her they just want to take all their property, and their Cuban maid is ready to blame it on Fidel Castro, who is of course the leading Latin American communist at the time. 

Her mother writes for Marie Claire and fights for abortion rights, at a time when abortion was illegal in France.  She interviews women who have suffered at the hands of their spouses and has very little time for Anna.  Her father goes off to Chile to share in Allende's struggle.    He also takes his daughter to a mass demonstration in Paris protesting the regime of Franco and they have to flee when the police charge with tear gas and nightsticks. 

Watching this film, I guessed where this story was going to end.  Eventually the overbearing nature of Catholic school and her social

ostracism when she is excluded from catechism class causes her to ask to leave the oppression of nuns in favor of a public school, and she acquires a new sympathy for her father's sadness when he learns from the TV news that Allende has been overthrown in Chile.  

It's a cute story and the child actors are the center of it, for sure.  You are unsure what her ideological destiny will eventually be, but she is learning both to think for herself and to have compassion for the beliefs of her left-wing parents.  Not everyone believes the same things, but that doesn't necessarily make them bad or evil.

French Cinema: Inspector Bellamy (2009)

This was a strange film in a way that only French films can be strange.  Everyone has a wine cellar and likes to fuck.   And when they aren't trying to do so with each other, they are trying to screw a life insurance company, which in characteristic fashion returns the favor and refuses to pay, hence the story here.

There was a mysterious accident where a certain fellow dies and presently we see his body turned to charcoal behind the steering wheel.  In Hollywood we would of course see the car go over the cliff and explode like a giant flower of burning gasoline and oil, but Claude Chabrol is more subtle and less given to explosions and gunfire.  Either that or the budget for special effects was not there. 

 Inspector Bellamy is not working at the time and a certain Mr. Gentil stalks him, trying to get his help but is not very good at even asking for it. He eventually does but not until he has lurked around his house, rung his doorbell, and called him in the middle of the night. He turns out to the perpetrator of the insurance fraud with his lover and massage therapist girlfriend, only she isn't a very faithful girlfriend.  The plan was to take a homeless man who bears a resemblance to Mr. Gentil on a one way trip over a cliff in an automobile, which happens.  It is not clear however what Mr. Gentil wants or what he expects Inspector Bellamy to do for him. 

I am unsure whether my confusion was that it was hard to read all the subtitles and watch the action on the screen at the same time, or because the time sequencing of the story is deliberately confused.  It was a little like watching "Memento" for the first time, but life is often like that, especially if you have Alzheimer's or ADD.  A story, which in itself would not be all that interesting if presented chronologically becomes a "mystery" by tantalizing us with fragments.  

As if this were not enough,  Inspector Bellamy, who tries to sort all this out for the somewhat helpless Mr. Gentil is also embroiled in another crisis closer to home. 

His half-brother shows up with a week's stubble on his face, smoldering resentment, a drinking problem, and questionable ethics.  While Bellamy is kind to his brother, he ultimately gets exasperated with him.  The brother is in a self-destructive spiral and with all the investigative powers of Bellamy, he is powerless to stop him. 

Life is what happens while you are  busy making other plans, said John Lennon.  This is certainly true with the life of Inspector Bellamy.  Gerard Depardieu, who is Inspector Bellamy, an icon of the French cinema who is by now very large.  Bellamy's wife, is a shapely and sexy older woman. 

It is rare to see a couple happily married on screen, but they are.  You kind of wonder idly how she could manage not to be crushed under what must be about 300 pounds of middle aged love.  But this is the magic of storytelling and imagination.  What is sex like in outer space?  I shall never know but it would be a boon for the passionate and obese.

Along with the contretemps of insurance fraud, drunkeness, family ties, foot massage, and crashing and burning, is of course the problem of   how women's undergarments  slow down fat old men in quest of a piece.  But in any case it is an entertaining mixture of stuff, and all these issues and more are there.

French Cinema: Cache (2005)

(contains spoilers)  Daniel Auteuil certainly gets around.  It was a bit of a surprise that he was featured in this film as well as the last one I saw,  "Apres Vous".   In this one he is in a dramatic role as a TV personality, Georges Laurent, who has a talk show on TV.  However he is receiving a series of anonymous video tapes and childlike drawings which are disturbing.  The first one is simply a video tape of the entrance to his house.  The drawings are things like a child spitting blood, and a chicken spitting blood.  It is all very mysterious.  Who is doing this?  He doesn't know at first, but it instills a sense of dread for himself and his family, his wife and his son, a sullen teen who goes around in a moody and resentful silence.

Much of the power of this film has to do with the sense of mystery created by the videotapes, so perhaps it would be unfair to spoil it.  If you want to see the film, you should probably stop reading now.  

The videotapes turn out to be a campaign of guilt probably done by the son of a man who was once his adoptive brother (I say probably  because in this film it is never clear precisely who does what or exactly how.).   Georges' adoptive brother is an Algerian orphan created when there was a massacre of Algerians during the French-Algerian war.  His parents out of a sense of guilt decide to adopt the Algerian child, but this does not go over well with Georges, who resents the interloper. 

Georges, through some never fully revealed act of treachery, causes the Algerian boy to be expelled from the house and turned over to an orphanage and thus "ruining" his life, apparently.  All of this is gradually revealed by the end of the film.  I won't spoil all the surprises in the film, but I would like to note the ending, which shows from a distance the expulsion of the child from Georges' home and the Child and Family services workers take him away. 

It is filmed in a manner reminiscent of the last scene in Michelangelo Antonioni's film "The Passenger" where the dramatic final events of that film are shown from a distance in a mostly empty space in one very long take.

French Cinema: Apres Vous by Pierre Salvadori (2003)

This was a romantic comedy about a man who works in a Paris Brasserie and is constantly trying to do too much, seemingly unable to leave well enough alone. Antoine saves a man (Louis) from hanging himself while rushing across a park after dark (also with the gates locked so to take this short cut he has to climb over the gate) to a dinner date with his girlfriend.  Not only is Antoine thus  late for his date and his girlfriend is furious, he recruits her to help him rehabilitate this suicidal man, who has been driven to despair by the fact that his girlfiend broke up with him.

  Not only is Louis despairing but he has lost his job. It quickly develops that saving Louis is a full time job for Antoine, in addition to the one he has already at the Brasserie. He loses his own girlfriend in the process.  It doesn't help matters either that Louis is a complete idiot and basket case who apparently has no aptitude for  the sommelier job that Antoine gets for him at his own place of work.  He also tries mightily to patch things up between Louis and his ex girlfriend, who works in a flower shop.  Through various forms of subterfuge and against apparently very long odds, he succeeds, only to fall in love with the girl himself.   And of course if one is obsessed with a woman it tends to make you do crazy things.

Anyway it is a very complicated story, I'll leave the story there in case you want to see the film yourself.   I am reminded of Roger Ebert's description of an "idiot plot:" as one where the problem would resolve itself very quickly if everyone in the story were not an idiot.  Maybe that characterization is harsh, but this story does kind of travel the well worn narrative path of the fact that when it comes to love, everyone's kind of impaired.  It's an entertaining comedy, but that's about it.

French Cinema: Le Grand Illusion by Jean Renoir (1937)

I can't say I liked the film when I started watching it, but by the time is was over I was in tears.  For me it takes a while and some patience to settle into whatever the story is supposed to be.  I knew it was supposed to be about World War I prisoners of war trying to escape.  I was expecting something edgier and more grim than what I saw.  There was little violence and no really evil characters, which for me, raised as I was on films like "Stalag 17" was a bit of a cognitive dissonance.  The Germans in military guise, almost by definition are evil, murdering, racist and creepy, and not as they were portrayed here.  In this film the German officers are gentlemen who show true respect for their opponents in arms. 

The German prison guards seem to like their captives and feel remorse at having to shoot them occasionally.   They are all doing their jobs, and don't much care for the job they have.  This is after all the first world war, which while a truly horrible war in which atrocities happened and poison gas was used, but the Germans in the war were not as yet as virulently anti-Semitic as they became. 

Yet here with the luck of having been captured with Lieutenant Rosenthal, who is a French Jew from a wealthy family,  they are treated to his largesse via the care packages his family sends him. Lieutenant Mareschal becomes his best friend in the POW camp.  

I suppose it isn't so unreal for the life of a POW to be much more lighthearted than that of the regular soldier, after all, for the POW the war is over, and provided your captors are not cruel (a truly big if) then it is an enviable state.  Reading a book like Robert Grave's "Goodbye to All That" certainly would disabuse anyone of the idea that WWI was pleasant.

  

I am not going to reveal anything about the ending other than it is very affecting.  The message of the film is a hopeful one made as it was in the darkening years of the late 1930s, when another war with Germany was coming.  Whether it was a fond hope or not I leave to you.   I thought it was an exceptional film.

Fahrenheit 451 by Francois Truffaut (1966)

The lack of success critically and financially of this first and last English language film soured Francois Truffaut from ever doing another, which is a shame.  It was the film adaptation of Ray Bradbury's novel of the same name.  It is the story of a man whose job it is to burn books, in a society that forbids the ownership or the reading of books.  Naturally in a society that will not comply there is plenty of work, as there would be for anyone trying to outlaw illicit drug use.

Cyril Cusack and Oskar Werner in Fahrenheit 451

Montag (Oskar Werner)  is beginning to have second thoughts about his profession, while his wife is completely satisfied  and taken in by the state controlled media, featuring a seated woman called "cousin" imperiously telling her and the citizens at large what to think and to do, all from the wall TV.  It is a society that is regimented and controlled and where the possession of books is a crime.   Meanwhile his wife, Linda, (Julie Christie)  is a brainless lump of a woman who watches TV, takes too many pills, and disapproves of him because he clearly has lost his faith in the system.

The Montages enjoying TV at home

  The fact that he is pilfering books confiscated as part of his job scares her and upsets her.  Clearly she is a woman who has allowed her soul and her brains to be sucked dry by the omnipresent video screen.    When she takes an accidental overdose, the emergency medical technicians say they've seen it all before, that all they need to do is pump her out and when she wakes up she'll be brand new and with a roaring appetite.  For them obviously this is routine. In the event her appetite leads to the one and only "sex scene" in the whole film, which then is only hinted at. 

Meanwhile he has been

befriended by a woman named Clarisse (also played by Julie Christie) as he is riding home on the monorail.  She lives nearby and turns out to be a member of an underground network of book lovers.  She is an elementary schoolteacher and is suddenly sacked from her job for reasons never explained.  On a visit back to her former place of work it is clear that even her former students have been convinced to shun her.  She is obviously finding her freedom progressively constrained by her society.  She has been denounced or informed on and the noose is clearly tightening on her life as well.  In the middle of the night she has to leave quickly during yet another raid by the firemen in search of illicit books. 

Anton Diffring as Fabian the Fireman

The systematic lack of respect for privacy and the personal space of individuals is made clear.  In one scene where the firemen are doing a sweep of a public park a fireman quickly searches a woman's bag and throws its contents all over the ground.   Clearly there is no need to consider the feelings of individuals.  Individuals have no rights whatsoever.  Everything belongs to the state, including your soul and your purpose which exists only within the narrow confines of the state. 

Books, being as they are individual things, timeless and subversive things, are the enemies of uniformity. 

Anyway this turns out to be a cautionary tale about the totalitarian tendency to snuff out not only all dissent but all thought and the optimistic view that even in circumstances of crushing oppression the human spirit will find a way out, find a way to be free.

If I had to quibble with the plot just a bit, it was the part at the end with the "book people".  This was a deviation from the rather explosive ending featured in the novel by Ray Bradbury.  I just found it a bit unbelievable that anyone could commit a whole long book to memory, or would have time to do so.  And what do they do in their spare time besides memorize books?  How do they live?  But I guess it is part of artistic license that the improbable goes unexplained.  It is a great film and I highly recommend it.