French Animation: The Triplets of Belleville ("Les triplettes de Belleville") (2003)

This is just a stunning animated film in terms of visual humor and sheer artistry.  It is hard to know where to begin, there is so much, and for me I think I'll view it a second time because it is so rich in nuance and little touches that make it a great animated film. 

The story concerns a grandmother (Madame Souza)  and her little grandson, whom she is the guardian.  In a rural area near Paris she raises him.   The film starts with her trying to discover what it is he likes.  After watching TV together with some old scratchy movie featuring a singing trio called

"The Triplets of Belleville" we see a scene seemingly out of an old newsreel, showing a series of giant fat women emerging from limousines and dragging along their scrawny husbands to see the jazz concert with Django Rhinehart, Josephine Baker in her banana getup, and Fred Astaire, who suffers a mishap and loses his shoes, which proceed to attack him and drag him off stage.

 

What he likes is riding bicycles, so his Grandmother gets him a new tricycle and he rides off happily.  She also gets him a little puppy named Bruno who likes to bark at toy trains.  Fade to black.  Years later he is a grown man and, he is competing in the Tour de France.  Paris has grown up around their country home which is now impinged on by elevated mass transit.  Bruno has grown into a big fat old dog, but still like to bark every chance he gets at the trains going by next to their little house.  

Meanwhile the grandson whose name is Champion, is training very hard for the premiere bicycle race and is nothing but skin and bones and these massive quadriceps and gastrocnemius muscles in his legs.  His grandmother rides along on a tricycle and keeps him going by blowing a whistle as he labors up the steep hills back to their home. 

Soon the Tour de France arrives and while he is wending his way over the mountain passes in the race and his grandmother is following along, still blowing her whistle in a rescue van, only the

shadowy square shouldered henchmen cause her van to have a flat and then they close in with an identical vehicle and abduct three of the leaders in the race and disappear onto a freighter before Bruno gets on their scent and they are left at the pier while the ship sails off.  So they rent a paddleboat for 1 franc for 1 hour, and follow in hot pursuit across the wide ocean.  

Surprisingly they get across and arrive in "Belleville"  a very large city with a very large green and fat statue of Liberty in the harbor.  They have no money and so are kind of stuck.  But then they meet up with the triplets of Belleville who take them in, who are still together as a singing group but much older now, and crazier than ever. 

For their supper one of them goes down to a frog pond and throws in a German style potato masher she just happens to have and blows them all sky high.  She catches a bucket of frogs and then goes home to serve them to her two sisters and their two guests from France. 

To make a long story short they form a team that tracks down her missing grandson and deals with the evil square shouldered henchmen.   It was really a cute story and I loved it.  It gained an American PG-13 rating simply because of the Josephine Baker sequence which in my estimation was pretty tame.  It is a great story for young and old. 

Woody Allen's "Whatever Works" (2009)

I liked this film, although it obviously covers the same ground Woody Allen has covered at least a dozen times before, namely the unreliability and irrationality of love.  Boris, played this time by Seinfeld comedy writer Larry David, is a depressed, cynical, and arrogant genius.  He was a professor of  Physics at Columbia and was "almost nominated for the Nobel Prize", he says.  So it is established at the outset that he is very bright.  But by now he has left his profession, left his wife, and tried at least once to leave his life.  "The canopy saved me" he says, and ruefully reflects that even that didn't work out.  He rails against the pointlessness of life, the meanness of ordinary humans, and especially  red state conservatives.

In spite of his harsh views of mankind and the world and his habitual tactlessness, he has a soft spot.  This is shown when, confronted by Melody, a young runaway from Mississippi, he allows her to stay with him.  A few days, is followed by a month, and in spite of their age

difference she falls in love with him and he grudgingly accepts her. When her mother and then her father show up the stage is set for a satirical depiction of a clash of cultures, as southern white Mississippi meets northern Jewish New York.

I should point out that I am by origin a midwestern white conservative from Missouri.  Having said that, for me, while the film does satirize the cultural worldview of the South it is not heavy handed or mean spirited, and

Allen finds plenty to satirize about New York as well.  Boris's character, who I suspect serves as a stand-in for Allen himself is a quirky, cantankerous, but ultimately lovable old guy.  The movie is a thoroughly amusing take on the unpredictable nature of attachments in this modern world.

French Cinema: Paris 36 (Fauborg 36) (2008)

I sometimes think that they only make great films in France, but of course maybe it is just that the best ones are the only ones that get exported to America ( or are chosen by my local library for its DVD collection).  This one is no exception.  This is an old fashioned musical on a French theme and used Depression-era France as a backdrop for the action.    This was a highly polished, sophistocated, and big budget production, directed by Christophe Barratier and photographed by the American cinematographer Tom Stern who has done some very well received films in the US such as "Mystic River", and "Road to Perdition".   It is kind of a love letter to the era of big time musicals of the 1930s and 1940s and its production numbers are glossy and smart.  It is unabashedly sentimental and dramatic in the spirit of American films of that era but the political and social struggles portrayed are all French, where just as in America the Great Depression was a hard and fractious time. 

  It is of course a well worn narrative track blazed in many of an old movie:  a handful of show people that are down on their luck pull a show together and hit the big time and live happily ever after, sort of.  I suspect the "sort of" helps this effort avoid being just another cinematic cliche.  And like many an American movie most of it is filmed somewhere in Eastern Europe, this time somewhere outside Prague.  Only a little of it is actually filmed in Paris, and a retro Paris is actually generated through CGI. 

Pigoil and son

The owner of a small theater, the Chansonia, somewhere in outer Paris is confronted by local loan sharks who insist on payment.  Just at the stroke of midnight while the theater is alive with a New Year's celebration, the owner shoots himself.   The result is that the theater closes and reverts to the ownership by the gangsters, chief among whom is the evil Galapiat.  Four months later Leon Blum is elected prime minister and the workers and socialists celebrate. 

Douce and Galapiat

He institutes a 40 hour work week and two weeks vacation for everyone.  In the spirit of revolution, Pigoil, the former director of the Chansonia and the former employees of the theater break into the boarded up theater and start it up again.  And things really perk up by the discovery of an aspiring actress and singer who is known as Douce.   The gangster owner, Galapiat grudgingly agrees to let them use his theater when he is persuaded to take a more benevolent and less aggressive approach to the effort.  

Matters are complex however, as complex as any Victor Hugo or Dickens novel.   Pigoil's wife has left him for a man that has a lot more money.  His young son has resorted to working as a busker with his accordion but when he is arrested for doing so, the authorities transfer custody of the child to his mother, who treacherously confiscates mail between the boy and his father.

Jacquet, Milou, and Pigoil

Jackie Jacquet, who is a clownish performer at the theater, is recruited by the gangster to perform at a Fascist meeting satirizing Jews in a thoroughly anti-semitic way.  Douce falls in love with the Jewish Milou, who is a labor organizer and something of a leftist firebrand.  Meanwhile Galapiat clumsily tries to seduce Douce by wining and dining her.

  Douce is persuaded to leave the Chansonia to dissolve in mediocrity while she pursues the big time.  Meanwhile the reclusive Radio Man, who went into seclusion after the failure of his love affair with Douce's mother, emerges from his enforced seclusion and convinces her somehow to return to the Chansonia and save the day.   As it turns out Radio Man was the composer of songs for Douce's mother who has recently died, and he has some new numbers to share with the world.  

Knowing the history of France in the late 1930's you know their world is doomed and that these characters, at so many cross purposes and with the spectre of Nazism on the horizon will not end but in some kind of horrible collision.  But somehow it resolves itself and the ending is satisfying as they always tended to be in those old musicals way back when.

Chinese Cinema: Still Life by Jia Zhang-Ke (2006)

This is a very beautiful film and a very visual one at that with touches of what I suppose is "magical realism".  The setting is the Three Gorges Dam, which is a hydroelectric project on the Yangtze River in south-central China.   At the time of the film the city that will be flooded by the dam is being demolished and the residents of the community there are being relocated.  

Han Sanming is a coal miner who is, after 16 years trying to find his wife, who left him with her child years before.  In order to support himself he works for a demolition crew engaged in the dismantling of the city.  Throughout the film you see scenes of groups of men swinging sledge hammers on the gradually disintegrating landscape.

In a parallel story Shen Hong comes looking for her husband, whom she hasn't seen for 2 years, who apparently has a better job, perhaps as an engineer and when she finds him, she asks for a divorce.

The conversations are laconic, and the silences between words are often long.  It conveys a portrait of people that are stoical and long-suffering.  It is at the same time a picture of modern China, where the characters have cell phones and i-pads.  Perhaps in a society with still considerable political repression it is the habit of those living under it to be laconic and silent.

  

In any case the visual element is very strong and the cinematography dazzling.  You see things going on which are not remarked on in any way but which naturally leave an impression.   For example during a demolition scene you see a strange group of workers enclosed in gowns and masks and other protective clothing spraying something.  Meanwhile not far away are the demolition workers who are stripped to the waist and working and sweating in the hot sun.  

In another scene a large stone monument suddenly lifts off like a rocket ship into the air.  Another scene shows Sanming sitting and eating somewhere at a restaurant, and at the next table you see a group of persons dressed in old and elaborately decorated regalia sitting around a table thumbing their cell phones. 

And in the penultimate scene of the movie you see someone in the distance walking a tightrope in the style of a flying Wallenda, incongruously against a backdrop of the ever-ongoing demolitions.

I don't claim to understand everything I saw in the film but the plight of ordinary people in the massive upheavals witnessed in just a couple of generations in China is hard not to see. 

There is an unmistakable kinship that all humans share with their fellow human beings no matter how distant they are and how divergent the cultural setting.  We all make do with what we have and do our best to survive.

Baran bo Odar's "The Silence" (Das Letzte Schweigen, 2010)

This was a great film.  It is part police procedural, but it is also about time, guilt, grief, and the dark crimes of impulse and passion, about the known and the unknown, the knowable and unsuspected, and those things that are never fully known.    Two friends (Peer and Timo)  share an apartment somewhere in Germany,  Timo is an architecture student and the Peer is a groundskeeper in the apartment complex.  They go for a drive in the country and, seeing a young girl on a bicycle turn down a gravel path, the driver impulsively backs up and turns down that path too.  Then in broad daylight in the middle of a wheat field Peer rapes and murders the girl, throws her bike into the field, all while Timo looks on, horrified. 

Nevertheless he does nothing, and later helps his friend dispose of the body in a canal.   Shortly afterwards Timo breaks off the friendship and flees.

Twenty three years go by.  The witness (Timo) is by all accounts a happily married father of two and a successful architect.    And now, weirdly, the same kind of murder takes place on the 23rd anniversary of that earlier murder in much the same way and in exactly the same place.  The previous crime had never been solved, but the similarities quickly draw the attention of the police to the older crime.    The rest of the film is about how the murders were solved or not solved. 

The police detectives are themselves fully delineated characters with their own quirks and personalities.  There is the older detective now retired who tries and fails to solve the older case.  He is still around and pursuing the solution of the current case while in a relationship of sorts with the woman whose daughter disappeared so many years ago. 

The younger detective is an unkempt workaholic who lost his wife shortly before and works partly to distract himself from his own grief.  Apparently he is a cross-dresser as well.  He is on intimate terms with his female partner detective who is clearly a few months pregnant. 

It would be a shame to spoil this one by going any farther than this.  This modern 21st century European world seems so normal, so commonplace, even universal and yet as it turns out, there is a dark side to many things and many people, some of which we will never know.  

French Cinema: Elevator to the Gallows by Louis Malle (1958)

(contains spoilers)  This film, whose French title is Ascenseur pour l'echafaud,  is an amazing film, part film noir, and part Greek tragedy.  I am also reminded of the line in Hamlet "What a web we weave when first we practice to deceive."  Clearly   the main characters in this one should not be trusted with firearms or motor vehicles. And Murphy's law not only applies but I am sure was enacted chiefly because of these people.

The story:  Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet)  is a high level executive in an unsavory French arms firm that is having a steamy affair with the wife of the CEO, so late one Friday evening he calmly decides to take a revolver and a grappling hook,

climbs up to the top floor of his building and shoots the boss, carefully staging it to look like suicide.  He locks the executive suite and then climbs back down to his office and walks innocently out with his secretary, while the security man comes by to lock up the building.  So far so good.   But when he gets down to where his car is parked illegally on the street, he looks up and "Merde!" he notices that he left the incriminating grappling hook and rope are still in place.  

   He leaves his car running with the keys in it, and hurries back into the building, takes the elevator in order to remove the grappling hook. He doesn't figure he will be gone long, but boy is he wrong about that. Just as he is riding up in the elevator the security man shuts the power off for the whole building for the weekend and there he is, stuck in the elevator between floors.  Merde indeed. 

Meanwhile his paramour, Mrs. Carala (Jeanne Moreau) is waiting impatiently in a cafe somewhere where they had agreed to meet.   Two young people, a boy and a girl are just standing nearby when Tavernier fails to come back to his car, a fancy sports car convertible.   They are complete idiots as it turns out, which makes one wonder why they were running around loose.  They decide to take a joy ride in Tavernier's car which becomes a jaunt in the countryside.

In the process they are driving past the cafe where Mrs. Carala is waiting and she recognizes the car but thinks her lover has taken up with the young woman.   Hours pass.    On the highway they are offended when a couple in a Mercedes blows their horn at them and they impulsively follow them to a rural hotel.  They are a rich German couple on holiday in France.  They strike up a friendly conversation with the couple and spend a convivial evening with them and taking pictures with a little camera they find in the car.  The boy and girl pose as Mr. and Mrs. Tavernier at the hotel.  The older German tourist, who looks a bit like Walt Disney, listens as the boy spins a tale that is obviously bogus.  Then he humiliates the boy by pointing out the fact.  

The boy gets mad and decides to steal the old German's car and leave in the morning.  The motel is one of those places where each room is a cottage complete with a garage.  The boy and girl sneak into the garage and when they are surprised by the German couple in the garage during their getaway, the boy shoots the two of them dead.

If things haven't quite hit the fan by now, they certainly do now.  The real Tavernier, who is still stuck in the elevator is linked erroneously to the double murder and his picture is splashed across all the front pages in France.    The boy and girl realize they are up to their ears in a horrible mess, decide to commit suicide by taking an overdose of some sleeping pills she happens to have handy in her room. 

Tavernier finally gets out of the elevator when Monday comes by and stumbles off to look at the papers and go "huh?".    Mrs. Carala is wandering around distractedly after having not gotten a whole lot of sleep.  

Inevitably the French police get to the bottom of all this.  The boy and girl don't take enough of the drug whatever it is to finish the job.  Mrs. Carala comes by and scolds them for being so silly.  The police interrogates everyone and gets the true story, which is clinched by developing the film in the camera found in the car, which there in the darkroom under the dim red light the photos tell the rest of the story as pictures of Mrs. Carala and her lover, Mr. Tavernier develop.

This was the first film that Louis Malle made that did not involve fish.  His only previous professional work was to make the first film documentary put out by Jacques Cousteau, the pioneer of underwater exploration.  As such it was a brilliant start to his film directing career.

French Cinema: L' Affaire Farewell (2009)

Farewell is the story of a successful western espionage operation in the Soviet Union during the 1980s.  The reluctant conduit of information passed was a young French engineer who was recruited to pass information from a disenchanted KGB agent who wished to sabotage the very extensive Soviet spy network acquiring technology of military usefulness from around the world.   French intelligence recruited the young engineer to perform this task over a period of several years which was then brought to the attention of the CIA, President Reagan, through high level contacts involving President Mitterrand. 

The Soviet KGB double agent ran great personal risks to pass this information, wanting nothing but the occasional bottle of wine and copies of music from the American rock group, "Queen" for his teenage son.  

This turned the lives of the engineer and the double agent into a pressure cooker that compromised their marriages and the relationships with their family.  

To complicate matters even further, the KGB agent had a mistress who, like his wife was not party to the spying.  The engineer lived with his wife in a French compound under constant surveillance by the Soviets including a housekeeper who regularly went through their belongings as part of the massive informer network then in operation in the Soviet Union, where every babushka was potentially another pair of eyes for the KGB.    The story as told in the film is a cat and mouse game of deception and counter-deception that makes for a tale that I could not turn away from.  

Inevitably as these operations go, things go wrong, and the wheels eventually come off the operation. 

The subsequent desperate situation it puts the double agent and the engineer led to a gripping sequence of events which made the film a thoroughly satisfying thriller.  The portrayals of Mitterrand, Reagan, and Gorbachev and high level meetings in the White House, Kremlin, and the Elysee Palace were convincing imaginings of how the intelligence transactions at the highest levels of government might have taken place.  In short it is one of the best spy thrillers I have seen.

French Cinema: Indigines (Days of Glory) (2006)

(contains spoilers)  There is nothing especially new in this film that you haven't seen in other war films such as for example "Saving Private Ryan" only those were Americans fighting the Germans in Normandy and this features North African French colonials doing the same in Italy and then in Alsace.   As in that film, here eventually most of them die in a shootout in a wrecked village and the lone survivor visits his dead comrades years later in a military cemetery full of row after row of markers.  .

It is an ensemble cast, a platoon, all established French actors of North African origin this time.   It points up the universals of war, but also lightly treads on the ambivalence which the French felt towards their colonials.  Shortly after the Free French and Americans liberated French North Africa from the Vichy French collaborators, the Free French started recruiting men from North Africa to help fight the Germans and Italians and to liberate France itself.    That these were Arabic speaking colonials did not matter.  In the egalitarian spirit of France, all were citizens of France, but as it turns out, the liberal rhetoric only went so far. 

One of them  acquires a French sweetheart in Marseilles before they move farther north into Southern France but his letters to her were not delivered because the Army postal censor simply did not approve of a North African carrying on a relationship with a French woman.   There is also the implication that the colonials were sent in to do the hard fighting while the

French troops sweep in later on to claim the laurels of victory.  In one poignant scene, the lone survivor of his platoon, Abdelkader, tries to convey to a French officer riding by in a Jeep that his whole unit is dead and the officer says, well, okay, this other unit needs a corporal, join them.  And he's off.  Meanwhile the army photographer is is taking a picture of some white soldiers posing with the happy liberated townspeople.  After all they did, and saw, nobody really knows and nobody really cares, they get a pat on the back and a cup of coffee.  

Years later Abdelkader visits the cemetery where his comrades are buried before returning to his little apartment nearby.  The epilogue, appearing silently on the screen explains how in 1959 when the French colonies were breaking away, the military pensions promised to those in those colonies were "frozen" and it was not until 2002 that court decision restored those pensions. 

It was all in all a satisfying movie, not without certain cliches (four men fighting the whole of the German Army?) repeating the old theme of a nation's insufficient gratitude for the sacrifices its soldiers made.