Tag Archives: French

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: CRIMINAL LOVERS (1999)

1 Comment

Les amants criminels

DIRECTED BY: François Ozon

FEATURING: Natacha Régnier, Jérémie Renier, Miki Manojlovic, Salim Kechiouche

PLOT: High schooler Alice seduces shy Luc into a plot to kill her ex-boyfriend; they get lost in the woods while burying the body and stumble upon a cabin, whose lone occupant captures them for his own ends.

Still from Criminal Lovers (1999)

COMMENTS: Let’s begin at the end, with two men in custody and a young woman gunned down by the police. Criminal Lovers dabbles in the language of fairy tales, so it would be natural to expect some kind of a moral here at the end of the journey. But writer-director François Ozon is much more interested in the morally compromised, and arguably all three of these people have done something to earn their fate. So the closest thing to a life lesson might be: those who do bad things will ultimately pay the price.

The most commonly referenced fairy tale in reviews of Criminal Lovers is “Hansel and Gretel” (a tale we have encountered here a few times before). At face value, the comparison is apt: a boy and girl get lost in the woods, and encounter a malevolent force who plans to eat them. But fairy tales are dependent upon a clear division of good and evil, and Criminal Lovers has not a good soul in sight. This is most evident in the personage of Alice, the amoral teen who leads on her erstwhile paramour Saïd, and then persuades the feckless Luc to join in her murder plot. The film believes it is revealing the depth of Alice’s monstrousness as we go, as it flashes back to her repeated machinations with Luc, as well as to a literature class where she reads the poetry of Rimbaud with a clearly sinister interpretation. But Ozon establishes her unscrupulous nature in the very first scene, as she lies to Saïd while teasing him. Even more than the world of fairy tales, we seem to be deep in the realm of the murderous femme fatale, a genre populated by such films as The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Honeymoon Killers, and most especially Double Indemnity.

That’s where the movie’s biggest twist comes into play, in which a nameless Woodsman captures the couple and proceeds to lavish his attentions not on Alice, but on the guileless Luc. Ozon seems intent on subverting the traditional male gaze, as Luc becomes the subject of the Woodsman’s carnal urges. This, even as the tensions are kept high by the suggestions that both teens are likely to end up on the grizzled man’s dinner plate. Ozon doesn’t focus on the anticipated violence; it’s your expectations for the romantic partnerships that he wants to disrupt. This was shocking 25 years ago, and it’s still a decent surprise today.

The way that Alice is kept around to act as an ugly counterpart to the ongoing gay seduction hints at the film’s sensibilities. Despite being trapped in the crawlspace beneath the Woodsman’s cabin, she still seizes upon every opportunity to rattle Luc’s cage, patronizingly complimenting him on finally achieving arousal during one of the hermit’s assaults, or laughing bitterly as she clues him in to the source of the meat he has just consumed. The film suggests that Luc is a more innocent soul, having done Alice’s bidding despite not really being into her (or, possibly, to women at all). Alice, even when she is in the most peril, is still a bad, bad lady.

Criminal Lovers makes a final strange turn in the final scenes, when Luc and Alice make their escape and the film turns into a full-on parody, as the pair frolic in a pool beneath a waterfall and finally consummate their union in the forest while woodland creatures cavort around their intertwined bodies and lush music plays. It’s played for laughs and eye rolls, and seems to be mocking the audience’s expectations as much as the conventions of fairy tale romance. It’s a solid joke, but coming on the heels of the tense thriller, the forbidden romance, and the dark character study, it becomes just one-too-many shifts in tone for a film that never settles on any one. So that final scene, with the violent end to one character and the probable lifelong incarceration of the other two, doesn’t pack a punch on its own. It’s been too inconsistent to make an impression at the end. Criminal Lovers always keeps you guessing, but never seems to have a final answer.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“At times, the film’s mordant absurdity plays with poetry, but of the most self-conscious brand… It’s one of those cases where the director trips over his own brains; he’s too smart for his own good.” – Elvis Mitchell, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Motyka, whose assesses the film as “definitely weird, if a little pretentious [well, it’s French.]” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Ozon's Transgressive Triple: Sitcom, Criminal Lovers, and Water Drops on Burning Rocks [Blu-ray]

Ozon's Transgressive Triple: Sitcom, Criminal Lovers, and Water Drops on Burning Rocks [Blu-ray]
  • Blu-ray Triple Feature
Check Price
Apocryphally Weird

48*. THE SHIVER OF THE VAMPIRES (1971)

1 Comment

Le frisson des vampires; AKA Sex and Vampires, Strange Things Happen at Night, Terror of the Vampires, Thrill of the Vampire, Vampire Thrills

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

“A grandfather clock is of no interest – a vampire woman getting out of this clock at midnight, that’s me!”―Jean Rollin

DIRECTED BY: Jean Rollin

FEATURING: Sandra Julien, Jean-Marie Durand, Dominique, Marie-Pierre Castel (as Marie-Pierre Tricot), Kuelan Herce, Michel Delahaye, Jacques Robiolles, Nicole Nancel

PLOT: Newlyweds Isle and Antoine arrive at the castle of her beloved cousins, only to be told they died the day before. Isle soon discovers that the castle has become the domain of vampires, that her cousins were vampire hunters who were murdered and converted to the ranks of the undead, and that the lead vampire seeks to welcome the young newlywed into her coven. Antoine soon recognizes the threat to his bride, but he may be too late to prevent her from being seduced by the vampire’s call.

Still from shiver of the Vampires (1971)

BACKGROUND: 

  • This was the third of a quartet vampire movies that kicked off Rollin’s directorial career.
  • Marie-Pierre Castel, the blonde half of the pair of Renfield-like maids, is one of two cast members to return from Rollin’s previous feature, The Nude Vampire. She appeared in several of Rollin’s films, usually alongside her twin sister Catherine. (Catherine skipped this installment due to pregnancy).
  • Rollin shot the opening scene, in which the vampire slayers are entombed, in black-and-white as a nod to classic Universal horror films.
  • The director credited actors Delahaye (the other returning cast member) and Robiolles with improvising much of their dialogue, as they would often forget sections of their lengthy speeches during the extended takes.
  • Actress Nancel was widely disliked on the set, but she rose in the crew’s estimation when she volunteered to do a second take of a scene where her body is tossed into a moat, into water that was brackish and potentially toxic.
  • Explicit inserts were shot separately to turn this into a porno in some markets (a practice that was not infrequent in European horror movies in the early 70s).

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Are you kidding? It can only be the clock. Isolde, the vampire queen with the ghastly pallor, has a knack for entrances, but none is grander or more surprising than her first appearance, climbing out from within a grandfather clock and immediately pawing at the naked young woman she finds standing there. Rollin himself was unable to shake the sight; he returned to it in later films. 

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Death by pointy pasties; cousins deliver exposition in-the-round

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Easily ranking among the most elegant grindhouse movies ever made, The Shiver of the Vampires is relentless in its pursuit of exceedingly tasteful presentations of tawdry material. Gothic fashions and decor coexist harmoniously with a summer-of-love psychedelic vibe, all for the ostensible purpose of setting up vignettes of softcore smut but really in pursuit of an air of erotic disquiet. The film knows what it wants, and does exactly what it intends to do to get there.

Scene from Shiver of the Vampires

COMMENTS: How frequently over the years have movies been Continue reading 48*. THE SHIVER OF THE VAMPIRES (1971) →

Capsules, Shorts

CAPSULE: GODARD CINEMA (2022)/TRAILER OF A FILM THAT WILL NEVER EXIST: PHONY WARS (2023)

2 Comments

 Godard, seul le cinéma/Film annonce du film qui n’existéra jamais: ‘Drôles de guerres’

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

DIRECTED BY: Cyril Leuthy

FEATURING: (archival footage)

PLOT: A documentary overview of the career of nouvelle vague icon Jean-Luc Godard, programmed together with a sketch for the director’s final, unfinished film.

Title card from "phony wars trailer of a film that will never exist" (2023)

COMMENTS: There have been a number of director retrospective documentaries lately: Dario Argento Panico (2023), Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer (2022), Satoshi Kon: The Illusionist (2020). These affairs are typically hagiographies wherein talking heads (usually other directors) sit around complimenting their comrades. Godard Cinema, originally made for French television, digs a bit deeper into its subject, and isn’t afraid to expose a few of Godard’s warts (his habit of literally stealing to finance his early films, his troubled relationship with first wife , his “inexplicable” decision to go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao). If there is an ongoing theme to Leuthy’s portrait, it’s Godard’s ultimate unknowability: early on, he observes that there are no known boyhood pictures of young Jean-Luc. Although, by the end, we understand why this free spirit did not quite fit in with his bourgeois family, the absence of much childhood biography reinforces the idea of Godard as a sui generis being who arises spontaneously in response to his time in cinema history.

If there’s one complaint here, it’s that, as an examination of a man’s life, the the pacing feels wonky. You may find yourself wondering how the doc is going to fit in the majority of Godard’s five-decade career when it’s already at the midpoint, and they’re not even through 1967. They aren’t; the doc rushes through the final 45 years of Godard’s life, spending only about 15 minutes on the entirety of his output after 1985’s controversial comeback, Hail Mary. Godard Cinema follows the commonly-accepted dogma (which this writer also endorses) that Godard’s vital movies were all completed in his first eight years of filmmaking, and that his work falls off an ideological cliff after 1968. The front-loading makes sense if you consider the documentary as an essay on film history, but as a complete biography of Godard the man, it falls short. But perhaps that’s why it’s called Godard Cinema and not Godard.

The main selling point to Kino’s Godard Cinema release may not be the documentary itself, but the supplement: “Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars,” the auteur’s incomplete sketch for a final feature. The piece is a skeletal outline for a work that would be, by all appearances, a very loose adaptation of the novel “Faux Passeports” by Communist artist Charles Plisnier. What we get, mainly, are a series of photographic collages, with Godard’s enigmatic handwritten notes scrawled on some of them (e.g., one reads “it’s your business and not mine to reign over the absence of…” The next phrase is blotted out by magic marker). Much of it is silent; other segments are scored to dissonant classical music. There is almost a minute of actual film, studies of a young actress wandering around smoking, overdubbed with Godard giving some background on Plisnier; later on, we hear what seems to be a dialogue rehearsal, read in both French and Russian. It’s impossible to guess what the final film might have looked like—did Godard intend to flesh it out, using these stills as an outline, or was it always intended to be a longer version of the experimental abstraction we see onscreen? It’s hard to imagine anyone but the most dedicated Godard scholar watching this “trailer” more than once, but it is an interesting artifact, a peek into a master’s creative process, and therefore worth a gander.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“[Godard Cinema] provides an immersive exploration of his influence on both the celluloid world and broader cultural landscapes… TRAILER OF A FILM THAT WILL NEVER EXIST: PHONY WARS, the final work from Godard, emerges as a daring and inventive visual tapestry.”–Chris Jones, Overly Honest Reviews

Godard Cinema / Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars [Blu-ray]

Godard Cinema / Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars [Blu-ray]
  • An in-depth look at the career of revered French director Jean-Luc Godard
  • Includes Godard's final work, Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars
Check Price

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: TOUT VA BIEN (1972)

Leave a comment

AKA All’s Well, Just Great, Everything’s Alright

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

DIRECTED BY: Jean-Luc Godard,

FEATURING: Yves Montand, ,

PLOT: Susan, an expatriate American journalist, and Jacques, her commercial-director husband, visit a sausage factory on the day that the workers launch a strike and are trapped in the building for two days; after the strike ends, they reflect on the decline of their leftist ideals, and their relationship.

Still from Tout va bien (1972)

COMMENTS: A full year after it was published, a particular excerpt from KC Green’s webcomic “Gunshow” began to gain traction as a meme. The strip, “On Fire,” tracked the fate of a bowler-hatted canine as he maintained his optimism in the face of rising and increasingly destructive flames. Intriguingly, it was the first two panels that became a widely recognized meme, setting our inferno-consumed scene and enshrining the dog’s preternaturally calm assessment, “This is fine.” Lost in the commodification of the image was the build and climax, including Question Hound’s confident ignorance (“I’m okay with the events that are unfolding currently”), his more uncertain self-assurance (“That’s okay, things are going to be okay”), and finally his ultimate fate in the conflagration, melted into hideous deformation like a decorative candle left in the attic. 

Tout Va Bien, which translates literally as “everything is going well,” lives in the space of those forgotten panels. While leftists remember the raucous events of May 68 for the drama of the strikes, protests, and occupations that brought France to a halt, the aftermath four years later find them exhausted, frustrated at their failure to transform society, and uncertain of the line between social and personal gain. So it is that a Communist leader, far from triumphing over the tyranny of capitalism, can be found in a store hawking his book. (“4.75 francs, marked down from 5.50!”) 

Godard and Gorin feel this uncertainty very keenly. Having spent the past several years trying to make Marxist movies in a Marxist fashion, Tout Va Bien was a step back into (relatively) mainstream cinema. As it happens, the movie begins with a pair of offscreen voices debating the traditional story elements needed in a successful film, followed by a series of checks being written to the many participants in the production. The message “you’ve got to spend money to make money” is clearly delivered.

But it’s not as though Jean-Luc Godard is going to suddenly go full Marvel. The subject of leftist dissatisfaction with their role in the political conversation is hardly mainstream subject matter. His technique is forcefully Brechtian, as characters frequently face the fourth wall to expand upon their complaints. And for all the power of having two international movie icons as your leads, the directors give them precious little to do beyond watch the actions around them as they unfold, and to describe their frustrations to each other—and to us. Godard may adopt the conventions of traditional moviemaking, but he puts them in service to a stridently political message, one that asks the question, “Why didn’t we change the world?”

Two of Godard and Gorin’s set pieces are genuine showstoppers. They build the factory set vertically, allowing us a peek into every room, much like the ship cutaway in Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. (Contemporary critics regularly cited Jerry Lewis’ The Ladies Man as a visual inspiration.) This proves valuable in predicting the fate of the strike, as we watch the angry employees break down into factions, fight over their aims, alternate between pointed agitprop and steam-venting vandalism, while each of them insists that their part of the literal sausage-making process is the worst. This is bookended with a stunning tracking shot along the checkout lines at a impressively large supermarket, wherein we watch the lifecycle of a protest as it goes from citizens trying to go about their business to mass defiance to the inevitable violent crackdown by the authorities. These are not surprising messages, but they demonstrate vividly what Godard’s filmmaking acumen can bring to the telling.

Tout Va Bien is an elegy for active leftism. Five decades later, the situations echo strongly with current events, and the young people in the movie chanting “Cops! Bosses! Murderers!” feel like direct ancestors to the Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter protests of recent years. But the outcome is also mirrored in our time. As the film concludes, a chipper tune pops in to proclaim, “It’s sunny in France, nothing else matters.” It’s the kind of song that’s probably playing in a room filled with fire, while a melting dog nods along.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Godard’s strange fusion of his pre- and post-radicalized styles turned off critics and audiences alike, but Criterion’s lovingly assembled new DVD suggests that it warrants reappraisal. Though certainly dull and didactic at times, Tout Va Bien is remarkable foremost for its sustained twilight mood of exquisite resignation, of exhausted sadness and bone-deep world-weariness.”–Nathan Rabin, The A.V. Club (home video release)

(This movie was nominated for review by Caleb Moss. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Tout Va Bien (The Criterion Collection) [DVD]

Tout Va Bien (The Criterion Collection) [DVD]
  • Factory sealed DVD
Check Price