Charlot47

So far, very few reviewers seem to have grasped what is going on in this film and the rest are floundering. For it is highly local and highly topical, as Chabrol contrasts two poisons then prevalent in French society.

One, more recent, was the evil residue of the unrest in 1968. In France, as in West Germany and Italy, minuscule groups of ex-students mouthing empty slogans took to robbery, extortion and murder in the apparent hope of triggering the collapse of capitalism.

The other, longer lasting, was the even more toxic legacy of successive military defeats. After the defeat by Germany in 1940, the upper levels of the French civil service and police were permeated with men who collaborated in the horrors of the Vichy dictatorship and the Nazi occupation. After the defeat in Algeria in 1962, the army was also infected by the bloody repression of its opponents, real or supposed. Too many men had learned that you got results by ignoring the rules and by resorting to torture and murder.

Chabrol's terrorists are suitably dangerous but bumbling, with only their leader aspiring to some sort of Lucifer status. His cops are terrifying, replicas of the Gestapo that had terrorised France only 30 years earlier, with the diabolical commissaire sporting a hairstyle of the early 1940s while his two goons could easily have been pulling out toenails at that time.

Though placing the story in a highly contemporary setting, as always Chabrol is not making a political statement or giving us a history lesson. His subject is humanity and its flaws.

PS One reviewer warns us not to let our children see this film. Not because of the endemic violence and profanity but because of two brief moments when a woman is shown with no clothes and a man is shown on top of a woman under the bedclothes. Both are intrinsic to the story, as the first glimpse is of a prostitute at her place of work and the second is of a terrorist, who (highly symbolic!) has to admit to the girl that he is impotent. Though it is always admirable to broaden young people's minds, I can't think of a single Chabrol film which could really be appreciated before the age of 18.

Not a film to take too seriously, since the murders in the snowbound hotel and the ensuing investigation are more on the comic than the tragic side.

Unfortunately, as in «The Mousetrap» which is one of the progenitors of this tale, one cannot discuss the identity of the murderer or their motive without a massive spoiler that would spoil future viewers' fun. Suffice to say that what has seemed trite becomes psychological, so the deliberate early banality ends with a nice twist of complexity.

And the German title gives us a tiny clue, as it is pretty sure to be the detective's last case (though, as with the Reichenbach Falls, one must never rule out resurrection!)

After the ludic extravagance of « La Chair de l'Orchidée » in 1974, Patrice Chéreau gave us this almost documentary descent into gloom.

A provincial daily is sinking into collapse, which means loss of livelihood for the workers and loss of capital for the owners. With its fall go the ideals of its founders, leaders of the Resistance, who fought against Vichy and Nazi dictatorships and dreamed of a free democratic republic served by a free press. Its sales are being stolen by a freesheet, set up by a millionaire interested only in profit, who fills it with lurid ads for cheap goods but wins popular support by backing the local football team.

To this communal tragedy are added personal tragedies. When the director is hospitalised, with not long to live, the widowed Judith is persuaded to come out of empty retirement and take over the paper. The employees, all infected with varying degrees of egotism and accidie, fail to unite behind her. Resigning in despair, her previously friendly young driver takes the car to her front gate but does not bother to drive up to her front door, saying « this will be enough ». She walks up to the house alone and we hear a shot.

Needless to praise Simone Signoret, almost at the end of her distinguished career, whose film this is. The many other parts are all minor, reflecting the insignificance of the characters.

Magnificent recreation of the supra-romantic novel of 1678 set in the French royal court around 1559. Supra-romantic because the love of a man and a woman is not fulfilled in marriage, or in adultery, but in death. As has been pointed out however, the film was alien to the mood of most French cinemagoers in 1961 who, the grim years of Occupation and its aftermath long over, had lost the taste for such rich and elevated fare.

Sixty years later, surely we can appreciate its many merits? Splendid camera work on magnificent sets and locations (Chambord!!), stately score, glorious costumes, strong principals play against talented newcomers, a brilliant script with every syllable and every nuance put over. The whole production breathes solid old-world quality, deserving respect and admiration but also offering different levels of pleasure according to one's taste and discernment.

Nicely rooted in the real France of 1971 and splendidly acted by the four principals, the crimes are treated as comic. All the baddies end up dead from a neat hole in the forehead, while the cop leading the chase switches sides to fly the loot to a Caribbean island paradise.

Between the three buddies there are enjoyable cross-currents and even, in the case of the femme fatale, twinges of conscience. Cameos include a teacher of English whose strangled speech is barely comprehensible and a lady next door who is overjoyed when questioning turns rough and begs for more.

By the élite, Lautner was seen as entertainment rather than art. In fact, considerable art goes into this entertainment: you get interesting locations, leads with some depth of character who are good to look at, and ever-lively dialogue. These things do not date at all.

A wealthy German pays for his daughter and two of her friends to go to Cuba in search of his son, who was researching the vanishing manatee but has himself vanished. The motives of the three differ widely. The boy Benni conscientiously wants to spend all day hunting for one man in an island of 11 million people, but is also consumed with desire for the girl Judith. The third, Katharina, just wants to sleep with all the handsome Cubans she can, by paying them. When the three at last stumble upon the lost son, he is living happily with a poor family who have befriended him and has no desire to return to Germany. Judith impulsively marries a handsome Cuban from an even poorer family and at the wedding Benni at last gets the sex he has been dying for, up against a wall with the ever-ready Katharina.

Hardly a romantic comedy, though set in picturesque locations with lively local music, the film carries a heavy weight in portraying its clash of two worlds. Two of the four Germans are able to overcome the taboos of their own society to find love and friendship in a very different country. The other two remain trapped, as symbolised by their loveless coupling at the end (though there is a possible ray of hope for Benni). Not having been to Cuba, I can't judge whether showing it as poor but entirely full of friendly and generous people is a dramatic device or reality.

A fiction spun out of any earlier fiction, this is not a work to judge by logic, being a current French film set in the First World War, an era no living person can now remember, and based on an unsettling English novel from 1873 that played with the fluid boundaries between the criminal and the comfortable classes, the sane citizens and the lunatics, the I and the Other, all shot through with existential dread of finding oneself forced into or trapped within the shadow category.

Layers of creativity separate the story from present-day reality, so don't look for authenticity or bald credibility but watch it for mood. For the continual ambivalences of plot and character, for conversations that illuminate or obfuscate, for the immaculate visuals that so often are in confined or ill-lit spaces, for the score which subtly accompanies the conflicting desires of the individuals. Accept the closing paradox, where genuine love is only realised by escaping responsibilities. More than a touch melodramatic and Victorian perhaps, but that is an honourable genre which many of us enjoy.

Well shot and always watchable dramatisation of an incident at the very end of the Second World War in Europe that not many people know about.

On 2 May 1945, six days before fighting would end, a convoy of German troops smashes through the frontier into the tiny neutral country of Liechtenstein. It consists of about 500 people, soldiers from parts of the Soviet Union that the Germans had occupied earlier plus some women and children, all under the command of General Smyslovski. At the Yalta conference in February, the Western allies had agreed that all such people they came across would be sent back to the Soviet Union, where their fate was highly uncertain.

Powerless to expel such a large armed force, the Liechtenstein government allow them to stay and be fed as refugees if they give up their weapons and uniforms and work on farms. The Soviets do not accept that the Yalta agreement should be flouted in this way, even though neutral Liechtenstein was never party to it, and send army officers who try to bully the government into handing them over.

Defied by the prime minister, who insists that his minute country is a democracy under the rule of law and will only release those now under its protection who want to return voluntarily, the Soviets switch to a charm offensive. A falsely jovial colonel and an attractive female captain go round the farms addressing and cajoling the men, weary after years of war and lonely in a foreign land. About 200 agree to take a train back, which stops when it reaches Hungary and they are all shot on the spot.

A postcript says that Smyslovski had been in touch with the Americans, to whom he was able to give valuable information, and managed to arrange passages to Argentina for himself, his wife, and many of the remaining men.

While the film shows no sympathy at all for the Soviet Union, it has the more difficult task of not glorifying the soldiers who had fought for the Nazis under their formidable leader Smyslovski. Once in civilian clothes out on the farms, the troops become ordinary young men for whom the war is over. Smyslovski and his wife are befriended by the prime minister and his wife, who recognise that he is striving to save his men and not just himself.

Like most of their little country, they feel that they should look after their unexpected visitors and feel nothing but repulsion for Stalin's brutal dictatorship. They are also aware that their far larger and richer neighbour Switzerland, equally neutral, had done much to help victims of the war and they want to do their bit as well. Not saints but decent folk, the heroes of the story are the 12,000 Liechtensteiners.

Yes, good fun and unfairly neglected. The three principals over-act enthusiastically because that is what their characters are like.

Clémentine Célarié as Gloria Soleil is the over-the-top rock diva modelling herself on Tina Turner, on and off stage showing all of her legs and most of her bosom under a ridiculous wig. Thierry Lhermitte as Brice d'Hachicourt plays the pompous upper-class twit, always formally dressed and fatally ignorant of such important areas of life as women and money. As his wife Bénédicte, Marie-Anne Chazel is his mousy feminine equivalent, knowing nothing of men because she has only known one and nothing of money because she has always had lots of it. Her hairstyles and clothes are a joy, pale imitations of Princess Diana.

Of many hilarious situations, one I enjoyed was when Bénédicte runs away with Gloria (definite echoes of Thelma and Louise), who is on tour in the south. After an open-air gig, the band and crew are put up in parked caravans and Bénédicte is billeted with the female drummer, who turns out to be a transvestite. To her unspeakable horror, for the first time in her life she sees an erect male organ: though viewers do not, I hasten to add, because it is not that sort of film!

A delightful comedy that has scarcely aged, with razor-sharp dialogue by Michel Audiard and fine photography by Henri Decaë. While characterisation is nicely complex for the two principals, Miou-Miou as a journalist hoping to expose a scandal and Gérard Lanvin as a resourceful crook she unwittingly enlists, part of the joy of the film is the effort put into the minor parts.

Michel Galabru as a corruptible bailiff who, when asked if there are any really sweet mothers-in-law, replies: "Perhaps ... Those who travel a lot .... A great distance .... A few lady explorers?" Or the director's mother Renée Saint-Cyr as a rich widow, who refuses all co-operation until she eventually succumbs to the lure of a plate of pasta in basil sauce. Dominique Lavenant as the owner of a restaurant whose regulars come above all for her crêpes. And, as in the best French films, much conversation involves and much action takes place around food and drink. A gangster complains when a delicate French red is served with Italian food and insists that something more robust is found.

Overall improbable, as comedy plots should be, it is an enjoyable journey through a France of the time, populated by colorful individuals.

A lonely young archaeologist is intrigued by the grace and beauty of the women in Etruscan and Roman sculpture. One work becomes an obsession, a panel in the Vatican museum he calls the Gradiva. In a dream he sees her in Pompeii as the volcanic ash buries the city. Going to Pompeii, he thinks it must again be a dream when in the courtyard of a ruined house he meets a beautiful young woman in antique dress. When he addresses her, first in Latin and then in Ancient Greek, she laughingly replies in Italian and leaves.

What a romantic beginning to a story! Melding the world of 2,000 years ago with the present, falling in love with a lovely woman created in stone by an ancient artist and then falling for her delectable flesh-and-blood double. I shall not spoil the film for you by saying whether will or chance allow the two to come together in present-day reality, but can say that you will find the Italian scenery and the Italian heroine worth every minute they are on screen.

Playful mix of history, philosophy, literature and cinema. Whether it rises above enjoyable post-modern pastiche to leave anything profound or perduring with viewers, time will tell. Lots of dry comedy enlivens proceedings, however.

The initial premise is a joke. An earnest discussion group who are reading Marx stumble on a passage where he labels the bosses as vampires, sucking the blood out of the workers. Although the leader insists that this is a metaphor, some participants take the master literally and start viewing the rich with new wariness.

When the millionairess heroine decides that the Russian refugee she has taken into her mansion needs his sensibility enlarged, she instructs her assistant to leave Proust on his pillow. The assistant, unfulfillably in love with her, decides to discover the secret by reading the book himself. His journal baldly recounts his bafflement that this is meant to be great literature.

An effete young aristocrat who has long had designs on her starts a long preamble that suggests he is working up to a proposal of marriage. When she implies that she is receptive and begs him to come to the point, he asks not for her hand but for a loan.

Irate villagers accuse her of being the vampire they hold responsible for deaths of their fellow inhabitants, but when the Russian (also in love with her) shows them a home movie in which she expires orgasmically under the fangs of an evil Oriental, several are convinced that she must therefore be innocent and that the malefactor is Chinese.

I should add that satire is ladled out over both proletarians and capitalists, the former being merely dim but the latter definitely nasty. And the pleasant soundtrack is probably an ironic commentary on what is being shown.

In Athens, an indigent young man from the provinces named Dimitris is hired to teach English to Barbara, a rich businessman's daughter. To get her fluent he has only two weeks, as her husband-to-be will then arrive from England to claim her. The girl has little interest in improving what English she has and prefers trying to seduce her upright tutor. Her thwarting of convention is merely typical of her odd family, whose riches allow them to follow their whims, insulated from the life of their compatriots.

Scenes suggest that Barbara succeeds in bedding Dimitris, as also does her mother, but that is left enigmatic. What does happen is that Dimitris becomes an appendage of the household, playing cards till late at night with the mother and her friends and walking the dog. The austere left-wing intellectual, non-smoking and teetotal, has become a lapdog and plaything of his wealthy employers. When he can't take any more, he angrily announces that he is quitting over the entryphone to their luxurious penthouse and stomps away. At the other end, Barbara carries on pleading and justifying herself to uninterested passers-by.

The corruption of riches is not just overt but also erodes the protagonist's spirit. In his celibacy he is particularly vulnerable, as home teaching includes the women wandering about with little on. The lure of the privileged temptress becomes a vivid symbol of the carnivorous nature of capitalism, eating up the little people to fuel their own pleasures. Not that the film is that crass, staying instead allusive and inviting reflection.

Lovers of Greek music, poetry and song will be well rewarded by the soundtrack.

Reviewers have suggested that this is not among the best of Malle's output and that the two principals lack the fire of real heterosexual passion.

The second objection is perfectly right, because Jill seems incapable of a grown-up relationship with a man, just as she seems incapable of pursuing any worthwhile career beyond that of international sex-symbol. Being highly desirable and readily available may be huge fun in your teens and early twenties but does not lead to a fulfilling existence. Her trajectory is tragic, beauty that offers not life but a hollow illusion of life.

While Fabio cannot resist what he finds in his bed (few straight men could), his feelings for Jill seem more pity than lust. He wants to protect her from endless exploitation by others and from her own immaturity. But, having gained an international reputation for the magazine he edits and the play he is producing, he is not going to sacrifice his hard-won status for a bimbo. He is creative, adding to the world's culture, while she is merely decorative.

A relationship between two characters like this will be short of fire, and it would be Hollywoodian falsity to pretend that they are merely consumed with passion for each other.

As for the place of this piece in Malle's very varied body of work, his non-documentary dramas differ widely from each other with few overt links. Here one has to consider his own evolution: an artist's fourth picture made at age 30 does not compare with a mature and reflective masterpiece like "Au revoir les enfants" made at age 55. Films appreciated in Europe can be lost in America, particularly if mutilated by tone-deaf dubbing and puritanical cutting. Also, I would suggest, we might separate films set in the past or an imaginary future from films set in and therefore commenting on the present.

To show the real superstar Brigitte Bardot as a fictional empty superstar, virtually playing herself (compared with her more nuanced rôle for Godard a year later in "Le Mépris"), is satirical, poignant, and even, dare I say it, darkly comic. If you don't get the joke, though many would have in 1962, you may not rate the film highly.

........ with magnificent music (Chopin and Morricone), picturesque locations (Parma and Venice), good-looking principals (Craig, Capucine, and Agren), and a real tear-jerker of a story. We have the driven artist, flitting from concert halls to recording studios, the devoted wife who sacrifices everything to further his career (though she is hardly very happy about it), and the sweet young thing who melts in his arms but comes to realise, like her predecessor, that only one person counts in his life: himself.

Though this summary is flippant, the three characters and their dilemmas are well explored and of the possible resolutions the one chosen by the writers is not blindingly obvious. And while much of the time the protagonists inhabit film world rather than real world, there is some nice satire of a nouveau-riche family lacking social graces who have filled a Renaissance mansion with expensive but horrible objects. Also a well shot, almost documentary, interlude on skydivers.

Anybody remember a film about a highly talented and highly egotistical Englishman who has built up a highly specialised and highly remunerated business, aided by a dedicated but taboo female of middle age, but is overcome by a determined young woman of modest origins who demands that he acknowledges and respects her? A few suggestions: "Pygmalion" (1938), "My Fair Lady" (1964), and "Phantom Thread" (2017).

Other reviewers have already spotted the echoes of "Rebecca" (1940), of which the progenitor was remade three years later with the same lead as ""Jane Eyre" (1943). I suppose it all goes back to the novels of Richardson and above all to Jane Austen: the lure of the older man with means who needs convincing that a younger woman will make a good life companion?

For over two millennia, Italian comedies have satirised lust and greed, snobbery and hypocrisy, both metropolitan and provincial. The version of this film on YouTube fails, however, to live up to its distinguished lineage.

Arbitrary jumps in editing eat away at whatever continuity of plot and development of character there may have been in the first place. While Renzo Montagnani performs manfully as the corrupt but not lecherous mayor, as his frustrated wife Macha Méril is wasted.

Though I can't be bothered to work out why chunks of film have been randomly excised, a possibility is that some kind soul has nobly tried to spare us the depravity of uncovered human flesh?

Blonde Marie (Catherine Deneuve) and brunette Pauline (Bernadette Lafont) share an apartment, working as prostitutes by day and in the floor show of a seedy night club by night. Unknown to Marie, her room-mate is involved with a musician at the club who leads a gang that has kidnapped the ex-opera singer wife of a government minister for ransom. Though the police fail to find her, a retired policeman who has befriended the girls cracks the musical code used by the victim to attract rescuers (a not-new trope, seen for example in Hitchcock's "The Man Who Knew Too Much").

I won't recount any more of the plot since, despite two beautiful Frenchwomen and a talented Hungarian as director, all three having been in some of the best French films of the previous decade, it is the scenario that in my view lets them down. Stretches of vivid dialogue, colourful character acting and picturesque locations do not in themselves a good movie make. Though the two lovely girls were always a joy to watch.

What a sad story! When Elena, a newly-orphaned girl under the care of her wealthy uncles and looking for love, has the mischance to fall for Guido, a newly-widowed older man in a modest job who lacks the intelligence and the courage to thwart convention and make a life with her, both are condemned to unhappiness. Their love affair is doomed: she is affectionate and caring but cannot marry in Argentina before age 21, and if she did would be cut off without a cent, while he cannot surmount the huge chips on his shoulder of being a cuckold with only a salary to live on.

Visually, the social and financial gulf between the two is emphasised. With the way she dresses and does her hair she would fit into the smartest circles of Madrid or Paris, whereas he always looks like the minor bank employee that he is. Emerging from her family home of a mansion in a park with servants, she races around in a nifty little white Renault, while he takes the bus or walks from his rented room.

Aurally, most characters' speech often sounded to me almost more Castilian than Rioplatense but Guido gives himself away when talking to any male of higher standing by continually adding the word "Señor" ("Sir"), going beyond civility to servility. It is a pleasure however to hear clear diction and precise grammar, unlike modern films where the more actors are allowed to mumble and distort syntax the cooler they sound.

Since Elena and Guido have to meet out of working hours and in places where they will not be conspicuous, there are many scenes of the largely deserted seafront of Mar del Plata in winter. What melancholy in the long empty colonnades at twilight, with the Atlantic surf beating endlessly on the great stretch of beach on which we see their two tiny figures! Their conversations reflect the impasse in their lives, going nowhere: a previous reviewer very aptly referenced Antonioni, and at moments I thought of Marienbad, as well as the couple in "In the Mood for Love" who try to understand the betrayal by their partners.

When feeling sadness for the failure of the love affair, one has to remember first that both may find happiness with new partners and secondly that they are fiction, that Elena and Guido could just be symbols for two worlds that resist being mixed. Viewers outside Latin America may not realise how strong social distinctions can still be.

Delightful bravura performance from Jean-Pierre Marielle as a French type, a man among men, full of mouth (his vivid and colourful speech a joy to hear), fond of a glass, ready with his fists, and would-be mighty lover. Though he enjoys successes with women, for a time, reality does not live up to his self-image.

The film shows us five chapters of his love life: first a failed marriage to the pastry shop owner; second a failed relationship with the butchery shop owner; third a marriage to the rejected mistress of the man who took his second partner; fourth rejecting the approaches of a music teacher; and fifth his wife making approaches to a lad half his age.

Whether age will mellow him into acceptance of things as they are, or whether his limited views on women will condemn him to more disappointment, we cannot know. But I found the journey enjoyable.

Despite a story offering huge dramatic possibilities and two top French actors, who can both inhabit a role and project charisma, the version shown on French TV too often seemed to show animated waxworks in sumptuous settings mouthing predictable dialogue. Perhaps the Russian version was better.

How close the film is to reality I cannot say, but it makes a fine story. Largely silent over the horrors of the Nazi régime, it equally avoids moralising over the ethics of nuclear weapons. So what we are left with a good old spy film with a resourceful German agent after American secrets, to be betrayed by an amazingly incompetent American sidekick and redeemed by the love of an American woman who accepts him once he renounces his calling. American economic and military might is portrayed sympathetically, as many West Germans no doubt saw it in 1956.

Previous reviewers have poured scorn on a plot they find threadbare, disjointed, and derivative. One is even upset because it seems insouciant about the geography of London, as if works of imagination have to conform explicitly to street plans.

Coming from a cinephile nation, the film's mismash of works like "Notorious", "Vertigo", "Blow-Up", and "Frantic" offers us a cheerful reuse of plot elements from iconic directors of the past in deliberate homage. Like so much of French art, it is not really concerned with plot mechanics but with people, with characters and how they interact.

Watch it for the things like the hesitations as people are unsure how others will react, the statements that the speaker cannot wholly believe or expect the hearer to wholly accept, the ever-varying play of emotions between a man and a woman who are attracted to each other. Enjoy the parallels beween the multiple deceits of spying and those of love.

Certain themes resonate through the works of Bertrand Tavernier: weak men, strong women, beauty of landscapes, a radical left viewpoint, mortal sin, and omnipresent death. If that sounds a gloomy mix, his films can tend towards a bleak view of how we so often mess up our short time on this earth.

By its very title, "La Mort en direct" addresses the big question we like to avoid. In the first syllable of her surname, Katherine Mortenhoe carries the name of Death, while her nemesis, Vincent Ferriman, is the ferryman of Greek myth who transports souls across the river to their doom.

Though Katherine is strong, as is Roddy's wife and the girl who approaches Roddy in the bar, human strength has its limits and Vincent's conspiracy against her is more evil than almost anyone could bear. Her husband is a non-entity, left rich by her suffering, while Gerald Mortenhoe is charming (who could resist his tale of the slaughtered musicians at Bannockburn?) yet ineffective. Roddy is punished for his weakness by blinding, an apt fate for a TV cameraman, and future dependence on the goodwill of his wife. Where is love in all this? Katherine's husbands loved her in their ways, but Roddy's abandoned wife taking back her sightless husband is all we are left with.

Visually, this dark tale is stunning with its claustrophobic offices and homes, urban contrasts between affluence and squalor, and glorious unspoilt country. The city is however the theatre for Tavernier's critique of advanced bourgeois society. We see rampant capitalism in the avaricious TV company feeding edited "reality" to its millions of brainwashed viewers. We see the use of science and technology to enrich some but impoverish others, not just economic poverty but cultural poverty in the falsity of TV and pulp fiction and emotional poverty in the erosion of family ties (all the principal characters have broken marriages, for example). We see the underside of the system in the flea markets, soup kitchens, and night shelters populated by indigents and vagrants. We see how a fractured society needs draconian laws and heavy-handed policing to maintain stability.

Recommended to all who think about where advanced societies are heading and how people can relate better to each other.

Sympathetic to the ex-queen of France, played with great dignity, and to her unfortunate son who only survived her by 21 months, the film shows her harsh imprisonment, forced to have male guards in her cell, and the farcical trial that resulted in her execution in October 1793. Though mentioning the revolutionary regime's precarious situation, under attack by external powers and internal rebels, the decision to hold a trial with its almost mandatory death sentence is ascribed to power politics among the revolutionary elite.

With grim glee, an epilogue recounts how almost everybody involved in the proceedings ended up under the guillotine as well. Though the writers do not suggest that the ancien regime monarchy was good for the country, then or now, they regret the betrayal of the ideals of the revolution, ending after rivers of blood in a dictatorship. In sticking close to known facts, the film is perhaps more of a visual history lesson than a human drama embodying flesh and blood people.