195. A Summer's Tale

Song - Here Comes The Sun (The Beatles)

Movie: A Summer's Tale - Conte d'été (Éric Rohmer, 1996)

Gene Hackman was wrong! And funnily enough, I think most modern audiences would have a far easier time with A Summer's Tale than with Night Moves. Those fearing French art cinema can rest assured that they don't need to be intimidated by this film's form and content, nor by the sexual prowess of its main protagonist. Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud), a just graduated mathematician, soon to be employed as a designer, has come to the Breton coast looking for a summer girl. He finds three potential candidates (Margot, Solene, Lena), but for all his efforts never gets much further than briefly making out on a couch. 

Gaspard has arrived in Dinard, believing he is in love with Lena, without being sure if that's true, whether Lena is in love with him, whether they were ever a couple, or if Lena is even going to come to Dinard as she promised. Strolling around the beach town, he meets the kind, intelligent and pretty waitress Margot, who, when not working on her summer job, is writing her PhD in Ethnology. She has a seafaring boyfriend she barely sees, takes an interest in Gaspard and soon enough they spend every day walking along the dunes sharing their hopes, dreams and anxieties. As the summer goes on, Solene, an acquaintance of Margot, also sets her eyes on Gaspard and doesn't waste any time making her moves, just before Lena finally arrives in Dinard. 

Rohmer mainly focuses on Margot (Amanda Langlet) and Gaspard, filming their talks in long uninterrupted scenes, which become flirtier by the day. But their mouths can't say what their body language does, which is mostly his fault. Margot is afraid to make a move, fearing, not without reason, that Gaspard might see her only as a 'stopgap' and break her heart. Langlet has a brilliant brief moment of hesitation when Gaspard mentions that he appreciates Lena because of her high I.Q. It's a line that wonderfully adds to the characterisation of Gaspard as a mostly good, intelligent and self-aware dude, who is unfortunately oblivious to the many critical moments when he is not good, intelligent or self-aware. The enduring image of the film is Poupaud pensively, and somewhat subconsciusly, stroking his chin every time his ordeal changes. He is forever thinking about how to create the perfect conditions for the right move, unaware that he is always playing catch-up. As a result, his behaviour in almost every scene, especially in the film's second half, is both inauthentic and miscalculated.

Many young graduates tend to have doubts and insecurities that lead them to wrong, dumb and sometimes regrettable (in)decisions. A Summer's Tale is a wonderful and quite authentic depiction of that, with two - Solene and Lena are a bit inconsistently written and mostly serve to illuminate Gaspard - perfectly realised characters. In addition, the film also paints a loving picture of Breton culture. Whenever he gets the chance, Rohmer highlights the landscapes and horizons of the region. And in one of their first scenes Margot and Gaspard visit one of her interview subjects, an old fisherman who explains how they used to salt cod and sings the favorite sea shanty of his fellow laborers. It's the first of many songs about the sea we will hear; we will also hear characters complain that the Mediterranean coast is not a real coast, because it lacks tides, with Rohmer highlighting the wet smudgy sand sticking on the characters' feet. He also finds space to highlight many of the typical sights of middle class family tourism. The film is very much a celebration of the joys and freedoms of leisure culture, best highlighted by a wonderfully joyous scene including a boat and an accordeonist. 

194. About Last Night...

Song - If You Leave Me Now (Chicago)

Movie: About Last Night... (Edward Zwick, 1986)

What a bummer! And an unexpected one at that! I have liked, often very much, everything I've seen from David Mamet, both as a writer and as a director. But this is a completely tedious film that takes the laziest stereotypes about how men and women think about sex, love and relationships, exaggerates them to the wildest degree, presents this as authentic, and then laments the sad state of affairs. Its only highlight is the opening scene, which gives Jim Belushi a brilliant monologue he hits out of the park, He describes a one night stand to his friend Danny (Rob Lowe) with flippant cruelty, misogyny and callousness, proudly emphasising his uncaring insensibility. It's a great portrayal of a very specific kind of asshole that the film quickly shies away from, choosing to depict Belushi's Bernie as a confused oversexed idiot with women issues who deep down means well. He is contrasted with Elizabeth Perkins' Joan, a walking stereotype of a (boringly written) man-hating feminist. The film condescendingly/disingeniously doesn't hate either but pats them on their back for being their gender.

Joan and Bernie are actually the sidekicks to Danny and Debbie (Demi Moore), who fall in love, move in together and then have all kinds of contrived problems, based around their expectations of what it means to love and live together. Their fights are more believable then their courtship, as they have nothing in common except for sex. But the sex scenes feel perfunctory too, because the film wants to believe that sex is the only thing that can bring men and women together and wants to pretend it finds that disheartening. Mamet and Zwick keep building similar strawmen throughout the film, leaving Moore and Lowe understandably stranded. At certain points their performances get uncontrollably shouty, but it's unclear what else they could have done with this material, or how their characters could be anything but tiresome. 

Ultimately, even the truest scene, the New Year's Eve breakup, is ruined, because of the film's unbending commitment to keep its characters in the narrow molds it has created for them. The scene wants us to side with Debbie against Danny, and to be seen as feminist for doing so, but seems unable to imagine that Debbie could prefer to be single rather than fight for 'love' in an unhappy relationship, or that Danny could have valid reasons for being unhappy. This being the 80's, the film does at least know to make scenes of desperate people running at night on brightly lit wet streets look appealing. Similarly, a shot of a naked Moore, standing partly in the shadow, partly in the light, is more charged than any of the sex scenes. And a shot in which Debbie and Danny are walking along Lake Michigan at sunset, with the skyscrapers of Chicago in the background, makes you want to be immediately transported to the same spot. As long as you don't actually meet any of the characters. 

193. It's My Party

Song - With A Little Help From My Friends (Joe Cocker)

Movie: It's My Party (Randal Kleiser, 1996)

I was happy to learn that 'Serge' from Beverly Hills Cop had/has a quite respectable acting career, and even happier to find that he is the awesomely named Bronson Pinchot. Pinchot is the best part of It's My Party, playing Monty, one of the many gay friends of Nick Stark (Eric Roberts). Nick has late stage AIDS and is organising one final party for his friends and family, before killing himself to avoid spending his final days in a vegetative state. He doesn't want a funeral or a wake and the party is supposed to be a happy occasion where all his loved ones gather together to reminisce about past times, and end their time with Nick with some happy memories. Monty is the most exuberant of the bunch, fully indulging in dark, irreverent, outrageous humor, with Kleiser giving Pinchot full permission to chew the scenery and embrace his instincts for over the top flamboyance. It's a very fun performance. It's also not very believable that Monty would not make one single joke at the expense of mainstream culture, politics and sexualities. Nobody at the party does. 

In a flashback, Brandon (Gregory Harrison), Nick's ex, remembers how a failed suicide attempt of a friend of theirs left him in a barely conscious state of mind, forcing them to use a plastic bag to get the job done. This scene should have either been left out, or the film should have paid more respect to it. As it is, it is very hard to justify the comforting and lighthearted tone Kleiser tries to go for. The film uses the party as an excuse to explore and highlight different aspects of the gay cultural experience in the context of AIDS, but completely disregards anger and frustration. Eric Roberts spends most of the film acting like a second-rate stand-up comedian making self-deprecating, pseudo-ironic jokes and giving comfort and lfie advice to the people at his party. The film turns his final days into a mostly nice and pleasurable experience and it almost becomes funny when guest after guest comments on how good he is looking. Some films get rightfully criticized for overdoing it with the makeup when presenting sick/frail/old actors, but this one could have at least pretended that a dying man can't really look like a healthy and fit movie star. 

This film is one of the best examples of politically correct art. It's an attempt to portray a societal crisis, without creating any sort of disturbance in the society. It's farily notable that the only gay kiss we see in the film comes directly after Eric explains that, while he used to be agnostic, he now can sense that he will live on after death and be somehow present in the lives of his loved ones, expertly summarising what is by far my least favorite religious idea. I would have found this almost indifferent attitude towards death unpleasant in any context, but it obviously didn't help the film that I saw it during (what is hopefully the endstage of) the COVID pandemic. In that regard, a party in which no one at any point vents their frustration about the surrounding virus, and the measures to contain it, does not ring true either. Finally, haven't seen Gregory Harrison in any other films, but hope he has more tricks in his sleeve than looking sheepishly. 

192. Inside Llewyn Davis

Song - Walk of Life (Dire Straits)

Movie: Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2013)

There is an idea that you can only truly appreciate Godard's Breathless (a film I haven't seen since watching it in Film History class, and not really caring for it) if you have a seen lot of films from the 1940's and 50's. Only then will you realise how radically different it was from what was usually offered to audiences and how much of a shock to the system it was. Inside Llewyn Davis serves as a 40's film for Bob Dylan. Once he appears at the end of the film, you may not become a fan of him, but you get it. The Coens let their Dylan perform the exact same song Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) played before giving way, making both his parting words "If it was never new, and it never gets old, then it's a folk song", and his music transparently obsolete. 

The only thing I don't like about Inside Llewyn Davis is that it is the least good looking film the Coens have ever made. But its aggresively dull brown-greenish cinematography does fit the presentation of the folk scene of Greenwich Village as something of an unremarkable grey sludge of good, but somewhat uninspired music. It's hard to deny the talent of Llewyn and the other performers, but none of these people particularly distinguish themselves or stand out. In all his performances Isaac emphasises how much effort it takes Llewyn to connect to the audience with the song. He is grimacing, hitting the guitar with purpose, outwardly expressing how much this all means to him, but it just never truly clicks. And while the film focuses mostly on his mishaps, most of the other characters we meet have similar (mis)fortunes. Some, like the bumbling soldier Troy, get an opportunity at something bigger, but that's more attributable to luck than to some discernable exceptional talent. 

I remember from when the film came out, some of the real-life characters from the Greenwich Village scene objected to its depiction, claiming that it was much more artistically accomplished and vital than the Coens made it out to be. Fair enough, but the artistic liberties the Coens have taken make for a much more interesting, moving film. It's easy to make audencies sympathise with great talents who don't make it for tragic reasons, or to inspire people with stories of underdogs who make it despite great odds. But Llewyn Davis not becoming succesfull is not a great injustice and makes a lot of sense. He lacks the skills, the talent and the character to make it, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't care for him as a human being, or that he should be stuck in a never-ending loop of misery.

It's a depiction that goes directly against America's obsession with 'winners' and the ensuing idea that only the very best are deserving of happiness. and is fully in line with the Coens overarching worldview. They have never been much into mavericks and genuises, seeing the world as incomprehensible and uncontrollable. Your grand plans can always be derailed by unknown forces you haven't taken into account and you can't stop what's coming. That's a much less individualist perspective than you will usually find in American stories, and much less cynical than it is often made out to be. It's also what allows them to inject wonderful absurd humor even in their most dramatic films. Few others would even try to include something like John Goodman's Roland Turner or Please Mr. Kennedy in a film like this, let alone make it work. 

191. Dazed and Confused

Song - School's Out (Alice Cooper)

Movie: Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater, 1993)

With all the praise Richard Linklater has received for his intellectually curious and eloquent characters, it can sometimes be forgotten that there is also probably no better chronicler of youthful dumbassery. It's because he knows there are two ways of behaving when you don't yet know your place in the world, and aren't sure of how to find it in the first place. You can either go on philosophical tangents questioning the meaning of existence, art, love and knowledge, or you can throw a trash can out of a driving car. Dazed and Confused almost exclusively focuses on behavior of the second kind, exploring all the different reasons for teenage clowning. Some characters make a conscious decision to switch off their brain, to not miss a wild night. Others are insecure  bored, nervous about meeting their crush, simply drunk, or a combination of all of this.  It takes more than an hour until someone in the film has an actual conversation, but even that is just a minor respite in between scenes of high schoolers acting out, getting high, posturing, drinking, flirting, driving around, busting each other's balls and mostly hanging around aimlessly talking nonsense. What else should they do? School's out for summer. 

Linklater did all of this better in Everybody Wants Some!!, as far as I am concerned his absolute greatest film. But even if Dazed and Confused sometimes feels like a dry run for it, it's an absolutely wonderful and funny film worth seeing. It's for everyone too; as always Linklater lets women as much in on the action as men. It is stil though, perhaps unsurprisingly, Ben Affleck who emerges as the film's MVP. This is very much not an insult; Affleck is probably my favorite contemporary movie star and I think one of the smarter people in Hollywood. He is great playing insecure numbskulls, in part because he is unafraid to show that deep down he gets them. In Dazed and Confused he spends most of his time running with a paddle after the younger students, as it is school tradition to spank the freshmen on the last day of school. Having flunked the previous year, Affleck's O'Bannion is doing this for the second summer in a row, and his angered frustration comes through the screen. He is desperate to humiliate the unluck freshmen, while both sensing that his fellow students find his despereation a bit pathetic, and that he himself doesn't get same gratification out of it anymore. 

The most famous role in the film though belongs to Matthew McConaughey, who coined his catchphrase 'alright, alright, alright' here and in his first scene walks into a bar just when we hear Bob Dylan on the soundtrack singing "this is the story of the Hurricane". I think he is a good and fun actor, but that's an introduction he has never quite lived up to, in part because he is also a bit too self-aggrandizing. He is wonderful here though as an older city employee who tries way too hard to impress high schoolers, That hoary lines like "That's what i like about these freshmen; I keep getting older, they stay the same age" actually succeed in impressing them is one of the film's many great details. But it's one other very brief scene that may be the most wonderful example of Linklater's understanding of teens. Most of the film follows teenagers who are around 16/17 year old and is attuned to their chaotic, restless and semi-ironic attitude towards everything. But when the film cuts to the 13/14 year old freshmen innocently slow dancing under the supervision of teachers, it slows down a bit and imbues the scene with almost as much gravity as the serious faces of the boys and girls holding each other in their arms. 

190. The Young Girls of Rochefort

Song - Dansen Aan Zee (Blof)

Movie: The Young Girls of Rochefort - Les demoiselles de Rochefort (Jacques Demy, 1967)

Not only is this a hugely enjoyable movie, it also made me appreciate La La Land more. When it came out, many critics, even those who liked it, pointed out that it is a bit derivative of The Young Girls of Rochefort and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. As Chazelle had freely cribbed (not that there is anything wrong with that!) from 8 1/2 and Rebel Without A Cause, it seemed to me not entirely unfair to view him as a good young director who should try to develop more ideas of his own. The opening scene of The Young Girls of Rochefort will not dissuade you of that notion, but as the film progresses it becomes more obvious that, while it may be the fundament behind La La Land, Chazelle doesn't just mindlessly take elements from it. It's a springing board for his own style, concerns and ideas, and there are elements of La La Land that I prefer over The Young Girls of Rochefort. 

What definitely did not help Chazelle is that he tried to emulate Demy's use of color in this film. That is just absolutely spectacular and inimitable. He seems to intuitively know how to combine color schemes to make each and every shot in his film as expressive and as appealing as possible. Every individual color in any given shot in the film manages to pop out without taking the focus away from anything else that is going on within the frame. As a consequence, the film basically makes its own reality, creating an obviously aestheticized vision of Rochefort that still makes it look as if the city's colors are authentic to it, and that its colorful depiction is simply a natural consequence of the film being shot there. At certain moments, during the first Gene Kelly dance, for example, Demy achieves even more astonishing things by giving the impression, if you didn't know any better, that he is combining live action with animation. 

I also very much like the screenplay of the film, which in the first half takes its time to introduce the characters and their connections, and always lets the audience be one step ahead of the people we see. This allows it to become a wonderfully elongated romantic farce in the second half, full of missed connections and mistaken identities. This is further emphasised by the film's framing. There is barely any shot in the city in which we don't see someone walking around in the background, unknown to the main characters at the center of the scene. They might be children playing on the street, mothers with strollers, construction workers or bar patrons, but life in the city is always going on, somewhere in the background of the main actions. And sometimes some of these background figures will suddenly become part of the main scenery and join in the choreography. Which also brings us to what I like a bit less about the film. 

Much of the choregoraphy is brillantly staged, most of the songs are appealing and most of the actors, in particular Gene Kelly, are great. But there is little variety in the songs, dances and choreographies. Many of them follow the same patterns and take place in the same 4/5 locations in the city. I do find La La Land preferable in this regard. There is much more distinction between the staging of, for example, its opening number, City of Stars, and the Planetarium sequence than there is between any two musical numbers in this film. There is also much more variety in the music we hear. Finally, while I am always in favor of more artificiality/theatricality in films, the more naturalistic acting of Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling makes their love more tangible than any of the romances in this film. It's hard to convey the particularly joyful whimsy of falling in love if joyful whimsy is your standard operating procedure. There is nothing as swoonilly romantic here as La La Land's flight of fancy in the aforementioned Planetarium sequence. Conversely though, there is also nothing as obnoxious as La La Land's final 15 minutes which play as an apologia for ruthless careerism. Whatever one might think of The Young Girls of Rochefort, it is never ashamed to be seen as a film whose main aim is to provide joy for joy's sake.

189. The Secret Garden

Song - Strawberry Fields Forever (The Beatles)

Movie: The Secret Garden (Agnieszka Holland, 1993)

The garden is real, the disease imaginary! So many similar stories take the opposite approach presenting a vulnerable/sick/empoverished kid and transporting them into a fantasy world, where they find an often temporary way out of their miserable existence in reality. Despite their best efforts, I've never found these stories particularly uplifting and got a kick out of The Secret Garden's insistence that Colin Craven can only find a better life once he embraces the reality that he is not ill and starts engaging with the beauty of the world around him. I have never read the Frances Hodgson Burnett book, but understand that this adaptation is fateful to its conception of the garden as an actually existing place. Too many films forget that this is different from it being a realistic place. The Secret Garden does not. One of the film's strengths is that its garden is fantastically beautiful and vast.  

Agnieszka Holland films the garden in a way that you never get a true sense of its geography and its size. There seems to be no limit to the scope of the garden, or to the colors, plants, flowers and animals Colin, Mary and Dickon will find in it. This is contrasted with Misselthwaite Manor. The countryhouse to which the garden belongs looks majestic on the outside, but its interiors are grey, creaky and filthy. It's filled with artworks and prestigious objects taken from Britain's colonies that were once obviously valuable but are now hanging on for dear life; you can almost smell the dust coming through the screen. The lord of the manor is the despairing Archibald Craven, who since his wife's death keeps his son Colin bedridden, instilling in him a belief that he is sick and will die if exposed to sunlight. A whole cohort of housekeepers is employed to take care of the 'ill' Colin, living in fear of death until his cousin Mary comes to live at Misselthwaite Manor when her ruling class parents die in an earthquake in India. 

Mary too is not a happy kid. She has been spoiled her entire life by Indian servants and doesn't know how to clothe herself or to interact with people. She is an entitled brat and the film doesn't sugarcoat her outbursts. Those first scenes are a deeply unpleasant and unflinching look at a miserable arrogant kid that has no clue of a life outside her deeply protected wealthy bubble. That starts to change when she finds three friends in young housekeeper Martha, stable boy Dickon and gardener Will. I really liked that none of these people change in anyway their behavior to accomodate Mary. They force her simply by being themselves to adapt to them and to discover what it means to be a kid, and to interact with the living world around you. It can't be lost on anyone watching this film that the positive transformation for both Mary and Colin only starts when they abandon their aristocratic, colonialist, confines and form bonds with the common people and nature.