Category Archives: French

Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959), Nevers, and Casablanca

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“Like you I know what it is to forget.”

Recently I’ve been meditating a lot on the impact of the atomic bombs in part because of the resurgence of the life and work of Robert Oppenheimer; he will be inextricably tied to Hiroshima and Nagasaki for posterity’s sake. Thanks to Alain Resnais’s film, Hiroshima and Nevers will always have a connection in the minds of cinephiles everywhere. 

Although I have walked the streets of Nagasaki and been to the memorial museum there, most of what I know of Hiroshima is gleaned from John Hersey’s journalistic account. The documentary footage from this film never ceases to scald my senses. I have to avert my gaze when the images grow harsher than any horror film imaginable. 

Hiroshima, Mon Amour gets much of its thematic resonance out of filming in Hiroshima itself because it comes with an abundance of inbred meaning; it will be ground zero of devastation and a beacon of peace for perpetuity now, ever since that day on August 6, 1945. 

This lays the groundwork for the film’s first half as we consider Hiroshima – the images primarily being juxtaposed with two bear bodies of a couple intertwined. 

It slaloms so effortlessly through time and space like few films before or after. Although as it progresses, the way the film and its characters are set adrift by the editing is increasingly unnerving. This in itself feels honest to where our characters find themselves. 

There’s something rhythmic, repetitive, and still poetic about their questions and responses conjured up by the voiceover penned by Marguerite Duras. It builds this contrast between the French actress filming an international movie in Hiroshima and the Japanese Architect that she’s having an affair with on-location. They only have one day together before time and space will pull them apart, potentially forever. 

In truth, once you know a little bit more about Resnais, it gets harder and harder to separate his film from this kind of relativism of the age where truth seems to be subjective and everything we seemed to take for granted before, from absolute truths to morals, seem to have totally eroded around us. 

Even with this perplexing development denoted by Resnais’s fairly oblique style, brought to even greater fruition in Last Year at Marienbad, it’s hard to discount the swaths of beauty in his film. And if it is mostly an agnostic film, one cannot totally dismiss this point of view in a world coming to terms with carnage and the brutality of the atomic bomb. Because this disillusionment does have an amount of warrant, arguably more than any other time in modern history. 

The movie becomes this roving portrait involving a want of intimacy and closeness in a world ravaged by so much pain and suffering. Is it any wonder that in the post-war years plagued with the atomic threat, the world hit its baby boom. Couples coming together to start their nuclear families as a balm to the hysteria in the world at home and abroad. 

They both say they are a happily married man and a happily married woman, but even this I read almost ironically seeing the connection they form. If they are culturally worlds apart, somehow they share in the same traumas of a post-war, post-atomic generation coming to terms with all that entails. 

He has the specter of Hiroshima to contend with and she was castigated for loving the enemy during wartime: imprisoned, her head shaved, while also seeing her lover die in her arms. They’re different experiences and still share something endemic to both their realities. Thus, they gladly share a real-world romance on the edge of the apocalypse as time is slipping away from them. For now, they have tangible passion and meaning that they can caress in their arms. 

There is a passage in the movie that felt reminiscent of the jaded pessimism of the ancient wisdom literature of Ecclesiastes: 

He: Maybe it’s possible for you to stay.
She: You know it’s not. Still more impossible than to leave.
He: A week
She: No.
He: Three days.
She: Time enough for what? To live from it? To die from it?
He: Time enough to know which.
She: That doesn’t exist. Neither time enough to live from it. Nor time enough to die from it. So I don’t give a damn.

There’s a fluidity to the night and their relationship as the clock ticks and they know they will be pulled apart. Eventually, they make their way to a late-night cafe called Casablanca. The name carries with it all these connotations: Rick & Illsa, “As Times Goes By,” “La Marseillaise,” and even bits of your favorite dialogue.

Of course, one of the finest remembrances is “We’ll always have Paris.” Nothing can strip these memories away from the Casablanca couple regardless of sacrifice. Somehow there’s something honest about Hiroshima, Mon Amour in that it recognizes all these things are transient – these memories of love will pass away. They are already dissipating, and not as eternal as we would like to believe. 

More and more I see the shared vision of Agnes Varda’s La Pointe Courte and Hiroshima, Mon Amour – finding their form as part documentary, part romantic treatise. It’s the blending of the two giving them body and making them sublime. 

Here the performers also work wonders. Emmanuelle Riva has the most vibrant eyes in the cinema. They are a delight to look at in the light of the camera both glassy and at times equally melancholy. It’s her film debut and you would never know it. She’s youthful and lithe, yes, but there is so much depth to her. Call it self-confidence with the prerequisite vulnerability. 

Eiji Okada seems ruggedly handsome, but not without the capacity for gentleness. It feels as if he’s experienced an entire lifetime during the war years which in part was true. The only reason he foregoes the horrors of Hiroshima is that he was off fighting in the war with the Imperial Army. 

I read that all his French dialogue was memorized phonetically and if that is the case, although I don’t always have an ear, it came together splendidly, never pulling me out of the story. It felt real and believable to have these two people relate in such a way. 

What’s more, as someone who grew up in a culturally mixed environment, Hiroshima, Mon Amour stands as a groundbreaking depiction of a couple who plow through the societal conventions of the times.

When I watch this film it’s about so much more than the bomb. On the surface, it’s about an illicit affair that cannot be, it’s about two people coping with the fallout of war, and one woman’s struggle to hold onto her memories and cling to the love that’s still there in her life before it evaporates before her. How she cannot forget this man in Hiroshima or that man in Nevers because they are tied to emotions and specific moments in time – times when she felt something.  

Somehow it parallels what the film itself represents. Because it is a document as much as a piece of art. It came out about 14 years after the bombs were dropped. Somehow still fresh and a minor lifetime away from the fallout. These people have living memories to contend with. 

Someone like me does not and so the film is as much about these character’s memories as it is the visual representation of the film itself so we might never forget what those places represent in the cry for universal peace. 

Watching it in a theater I could sense a level of perplexity in the air. It’s not an easy film. Not everything makes sense, and there’s some troubling conclusions that you can come to. Also, one earth-shattering slap in a cafe is hard to deal with. Still, in the wake of all of this, it’s hard to reject the moments of beauty present here. I don’t think this is a mere justification. 

Rather I watch a movie like Hiroshima, Mon Amour where not everything is summed up or painted in full. We must leave with the impressions, the maddening anti-literalism of the piece that has no point-for-point attributions we can easily plug in. Nothing comes out in a nice bow nor do we get a true emotional resolution. It just kind of hangs in the air for us to consider in full.

But sometimes this hard work when something is perplexing feels all the more worthwhile because it provides something worth going back to so we might cull for something new. I’m never going to understand every grain of this film, and that’s okay. 

The distinction is having something to fall back on. When memories fade and we forget and the world seems to be fragmenting around us, it helps to have some standard or reference point outside ourselves to mediate the chaos. 

Otherwise, what’s the point if there’s no time to live and no time to die? What hope is left in such a debilitating landscape? On top of that, there’s a bomb that might just easily blow us all to smithereens. We require something more. 

4.5/5 Stars

Summer Hours (2008)

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A few years ago my mother helped sell my grandparents’ home, and it was a home they had resided in for well nigh 50 years. They were not affluent French folk with a fine arts collection; what they did have was a connection to that space.

And it wasn’t just my grandparents but my mother and her siblings, and then all the grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who had varying attachments. It’s a strange sensation when a space that has been an element of your life for many years, or in my case, as long as I can remember, is boarded up or renovated and the cycle of life continues there. It’s these kinds of ideas Oliver Assayas’ Summer Hours bring to the fore, and I’m sure many can easily relate.

The movie opens with the 75th birthday of the family’s matriarch (Edith Scob). It has remained her lifelong mission to the maintain the legacy of the famed artist, and her uncle, Paul Berthier. But she’s also pragmatic and realizes the reality, resigned to the facts. “A lot of things will be leaving with me. Memories, secrets, stories that interest no one anymore,” she says. The same might be said of the Corot paintings and a broken plaster that belonged to Degas. They are impressive relics but relics nonetheless.

They are an imperfect family — what one isn’t — but even if you compare this film to something like A Christmas Tale, the story is not so much borne out of dysfunction, but what the passing of generations and time means to us all. Things cannot mean the same or remain the same for all of us. We are bound to see them in a different light.

The seeds are sown early on: one son (Jérémie Renier ) is based abroad in China and a daughter (Juliette Binoche) lives in New York for work in the design industry. It’s quite a long trek for them to get back to France and see their mother. Only the eldest, Frederick (Charles Berling), lives nearby with his family. This doesn’t feel altogether unusual, in fact, many of the people I know in the fast pace world I live in, are not close to relatives. This is a luxury. Eventually, the presents are opened, small talk is had, kisses are shared, and the family must leave.

Once again, the mother is left alone. It’s not callous; it’s reality. I’ve noticed Assayas employs long fade-outs in his films. It could have several uses, but it also suggests the passage of time. Their mother Helene is gone quite abruptly, and they must contend with her affairs.

If you wanted to be crass, you could pattern the movie after Citizen Kane, instead focusing on a French lady who left behind a lot of artifacts for her family to quibble over. It’s all very tasteful and orderly but still, there’s something so unnatural about going through the possessions of the departed.

The one son who still lives in France has a romanticism about him, assuring his mother all her work will not be dissolved, and they will hold onto her country home for the grandchildren. He doesn’t want to believe what she’s already accepted. Sure enough, things begin to progress just as she foresaw. And although I didn’t want to believe it, I also realized I was blinded because life gets in the way.

It doesn’t really make sense to hold onto the place. It’s not practical and with most of the family out of the country anyway and the money needing to be split three ways, how do you do that without causing rancor to build up? No, it makes the most sense to sell, donate, and auction off as much as possible. And so they do just that.

They work through the arrangements and make sure their mother’s faithful housekeeper is well taken care of or at least as best as they can manage. It still feels like an unceremonious end.

Pretty soon beloved family heirlooms are in a museum where they can benefit more people. It’s history for them to appreciate. But it also feels austere and unenchanted. There’s a distance between it and the people who are meant to enjoy it. Now they are quite literally museum pieces.

I had a friend I met overseas. She was not French but she loved Nice dearly. It was the home of Auguste Renoir, one of the country’s most beloved painters. I bring it up only because she is from a different generation and somehow it feels like they have a greater appreciation for the natural arts. It’s not that they have a monopoly or that none of us care, but we’ve come of age in a different time of modern art, technology, and globalization.

Summer Hours made me grapple with these emerging realities all the more pervasive in an era well after the film’s release in 2008. The past can never quite hold the same sort of import for us because they are not our personal experience and never can be. My parents have memories I will never know or just as easily forget if they tell me. Grandparents lived in generations I will never fully comprehend nor appreciate.

But it’s not like we can sit around taking stock of everything they ever did. It’s not a game we can ever hope to win against the inevitable march of time or unexpected human tragedy. It would be totally futile and hopeless otherwise.

It’s what makes the organic moments we get, a stray memory or a long-hidden away anecdote, all the more special. And yet it seems we would do well to know their stories and their history as best as we can.

I’m still not sold on the importance of leading a lasting legacy. That’s perhaps something only affluent French people and film critics dither about. I’m not sure. But there is something to respecting history and where we’ve come from while still continuing to navigate our everyday lives. We must strike a balance.

In Summer Hours we see the dissolution of years of work right in front of us, not out of malevolence but due to life and necessity  — choosing the path of least resistance. It’s hard to admit, but these are the things we all strive for and so it’s hard to blame these characters for any of their actions. Even if it doesn’t seem entirely right, it’s also a part of life.

One of my primary qualms with the picture is how it seemed to pick up ancillary characters only to drop them. We meet Binoche’s boyfriend in one scene, Eloise’s nephew is a kindly cab driver, and we meet Frederic’s kids.

His daughter was a character I was skeptical of and yet she becomes one of the most crucial as a kind of bridge between generations. The mother’s home is about to be sold at the end of the summer, and so they have a short amount of time to enjoy it. Rather than being prudish about it, they let their kids hold a party. I was half wondering if they expected the kids to trash the place and turn it into a kind of funeral pyre. With all the youth flooding in it feels like the place is about to be met with desecration.

Instead, something else happens. They hold their party. The grounds are full of exuberant young teens and adolescents hanging out and having a good time. It’s somehow a recontextualization and a new life for the space. We almost forget all the old antiquities and works of art and now only see it with all this youthfulness dancing around and enjoying one another’s company.

The daughter sneaks off with her young beau no doubt like her grandmother before her, and we feel a certain amount of catharsis in a situation that is left relatively open-ended. We didn’t have a party in my grandparent’s backyard to send it out — I kind of wish we had — but I’d like to think that like Summer Hours a young family or some kids are enjoying that space like we did a couple of decades before.

4/5 Stars

Irma Vep (1996)

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Our entry point into Irma Vep as an English-speaking audience is Maggie Leung, and although this is a French production from Olivier Assayas, it’s almost as if he’s provided us an avatar. The cinematic Maggie in the film becomes our window into the world created around her.

Although the film is from a bygone generation, it’s modern in the way of filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch who seem curious, open-minded, and intent on fleshing out stories that spill out across different cultures.

Cheung is congenial throughout, and it’s no wonder she has become a luminary figure in world cinema. In The Mood for Love will immortalize her and Tony Leung for posterity’s sake. But in Irma Vep she feels so much like a contemporary person we can comprehend and understand intuitively. She’s an actress yes, but there’s something down-to-earth and so personable about her.

In a film of  continual strife, she seems to be this enduring ray of optimism and warmth for everyone around her. Although her being an outsider carries with it a certain naivete, she’s also excited to work and do something she finds to be enjoyable.

Even as the local crew gripe with one another, most everyone is amenable to her, speaking English and doing their best to make her feel at home regardless of what they think about her casting. One of her primary acquaintances is Zoe (Nathalie Richard), a fiery costumer who helps her navigate the chaos by transporting her around the city and welcoming Maggie into their nighttime commune of technicians. She also harbors a little crush on the film star.

It’s a wonderful confluence of worlds being smashed together and even with its humble handheld camera sensibilities, we recognize the international scope of the production. This is what French cinema, what European cinema, can afford us if we burst through our myopic Hollywood blockbuster lens.

It has a brash energy to it that fits in with the up-and-coming directors of the ’80s and ’90s. Some had been to film school, others knew about the French New Wave, and out of it was birthed a generation of films full of grit, life, and personal expression. Assayas might be a few years older, but he looks intent to say something very particular.

Part of me wonders if this period of film is dead as our technology gets more advanced, and it becomes cheaper to shoot better quality footage that more easily hides budgetary restraints. Obviously low budgets are still a part and parcel of making it in the industry, but with filmmakers like Richard Linklater or even Assayas here, there’s a certain simplicity to their work where their personal vision in some ways outpaces or totally transcends the limited resources at their disposal.

I was thinking how much ’90s energy the film embodies when it harnesses Sonic Youth’s “Tunic” doing a survey of Maggie’s hotel room when she returns home late at night. We are constantly bumping up against the self-reflexive nature of the movie with Cheung playing a film version of herself. She is the Hong Kong action star who Rene Vidal (Jean-Pierre Leaud) believes is the only enigmatic beauty in the world who can play the modern incarnation of his heroine: Irma Vep.

When she’s not slinking around her scenes or getting fitted in a latex catsuit, she’s being interviewed by a French journalist about John Woo action cinema and French stars like Alain Delon and Catherine Deneuve — real constellations of film history.

It’s almost second nature to trace the lineage from Day for Night to Irma Vep even as it’s indebted to the silents: Les Vampires in particular. Jean-Pierre Leaud’s eccentric mad scientist behind the camera spouts off his director-speak between sips of his 2-liter Coca-Cola. It’s his mercurial nature guiding the whole production and thus sending it toward a tailspin of discombobulation.

Day for Night is often about this illusion of cinema where you don’t know where the movie ends and reality begins. Irma Vep has some of that — Cheung becoming a nighttime cat burglar quickly comes to mind — but its greatest debt to the earliest project is portraying the behind-the-scenes mayhem of a film production.

So much goes wrong; there’s chaos and personal troubles. Watching films such as these, it’s a wonder movies get made at all. If I’m sometimes uncompassionate toward Hollywood, then Irma Vep gives Assayas license to bash the French film industry whether it be navel-gazing directors or unprofessional crews. However, for all the criticisms he lobs its way, he’s still a part of it, and revels in its traditions because it still manages to be deep and rich. One must appreciate how both can be true at the same time. So it is with Irma Vep.

Leaud is the first of the main players to evaporate into the silence. Then Maggie drives off in a taxi, and we never see her again in the flesh. The film itself descends into a hypnotic montage of shapes and images and rhythms, with eyes scraped out and a kind of gutted soundscape.

What it is exactly? You tell me. All I know is I felt something. Irma Vep is a reminder that the moving image has unadulterated power, and it’s what’s made the movies such a mesmerizing opiate for over a century. We’re still finding new layers and new forms of self-expression in them all these years later. I hope this does not die out any time soon.

4/5 Stars

Vagabond (1985): Agnes Varda’s Empathetic Kane

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Vagabond (or Sans toit ni loi, in French) plays as the sum of a fairly dismal life but not an unworthy one. For those familiar with Agnes Varda’s filmography, whether the penchant for seascapes or her concerted empathy for the discarded, it’s easy to see how this picture fits in with the others. In many ways, it blends her sensibilities for narrative fiction and her later documentary work like The Gleaners and I.

However, from a storytelling perspective, Vagabond also plays as her Citizen Kane, except she sets her sight on someone on the complete opposite end of the human spectrum. It’s curious how the paragon of money and power could somehow share fundamental things in common with a proud, young drifter. They feel so isolated and in some sense unknowable because they rarely allow others in.

Citizen Kane is a veritable jungle gym of technical invention and play. There’s never been anything quite like it, but the qualm I always maintained on early viewings is how there’s no connection. Because this is the point. It feels a bit hollow. We never get to truly know Charles Foster Kane because he never really let anyone know him.

The curious thing is how Varda derives so much concern for her subject. If we don’t end up knowing a great deal about her personal biography, it does feel like we at least appreciate her as a ceaselessly proud and increasingly worn-down human being.

I have so little history with Sandrine Bonaire and know only that she made an auspicious appearance in Maurice Pialat’s A Nos Amour (1983). However, watching her is a pleasure; she looks like a more stoic predecessor to Brie Larson.

In many ways, Bonaire’s character informs the structure of the film and so it functions well. She is an itinerant young woman, free and apparently happy with her lifestyle. It’s easy to label her as a vagrant and a loafer. She never holds down a consistent job and maintains a brusque belligerence in the face of others. It makes her fiercely independent, and skeptical about the prevailing philosophies of life.

Through it all, we don’t know where she will go; she fosters these short, finite relationships that have a definite beginning and end, and then she moves on to her next destination. There’s no goal or visible endpoint. All we have is the frame of the story to give us some reference to make sense of her life.

It’s composed of scenes featuring these kinds of visual ellipsis as people she interacted with recount their meetings. Each person views her in a different light, and we must come to understand her in this piecemeal fashion only through the perspective of others.

There’s a bohemian family of shepherds who used to be a part of the establishment but now live a rural, much simpler life taking care of livestock. The closest thing she has to a friend and a saint is a beautiful academic (Macha Méril), who has spent her life researching a fungus brought over during WWII that is slowly killing the local trees. She has a conscience and a warm spirit. Far from deterring her, the girl’s standoffish nature of cigarettes and glowering glances only seems to bring out greater adulation. There’s a hint her benefactor feels it too.

A Tunisian farmhand with a welcoming spirit is another person of generosity in her life. They seem to have nothing in common, and yet they bond because they have shared a similar experience of the world as perennial outsiders. He’s the only person she actually shares her birth name with: It’s Mona.

But our protagonist opens herself up only to get hurt. He offers to let her stay in their quarters and help take care of the local vineyards. It’s another brief promise of something beyond a drifter’s life, however small. Still, upon his coworkers’ return, they’re not agreeable to having a woman in their midst. She’s forced to push on again. It’s the life she’s used to, and yet the circumstances make the moment a far more painful point of departure.

There are signs that this is not sustainable no matter how romantic it might seem. Mona befriends an old white-haired lady slowly dying in her grand estate after posing as her maid. Would Mona have been a friend of Charles Foster Kane? This is the closest thing we have to answer, although it too becomes a closed door as the woman’s only kin, a young nephew is anxious to get what’s coming to him.

In a bit of serendipity worthy of Varda’s husband Jacques Demy, there is a kind of interwoven fate to these relationships as some of them begin to fold over on one another and interconnect with Mona in the middle. But this must not be mistaken for Providence.

Her lot becomes increasingly bleak, and there’s obvious intent here. There’s no other place to go. Whether Varda failed to show them before or not, I started to notice the makeshift carpet shoes Mona wears on her feet. She feels all the more pitiful falling in with dubious company and beginning to drink more.

She’s also accosted by some local practical jokers who run about town throwing paint bombs in a mad show of anarchy and artistic expression. There’s no rhyme or reason to it per se, although it leaves her more disillusioned and covered in brown paint that makes her look even more feeble than before. Then, a fire takes her belongings, and she must flee in the wake of an angry confrontation. She’s offered no respite.

At once such a proud and independent individual, she looks so dejected when we finally leave her shivering in her blanket trying to stay warm as a dog barks at her from right outside. It does feel as if the window has closed for her. She had glimpses of other lives and yet they all amounted to nothing. And she is left with nothing.

Freedom is such an exhilarating thing, not being totally beholden to the strictures of the world around us. But it’s equally terrifying being cast out into a life where we have no one to care for us, no one there to love or be loved by. Here again, Vagabond and Kane are so closely related. Whether we die in a luxurious bedroom or a ditch by the roadside, it doesn’t much matter. The outcomes are the same. There’s something ultimately deceptive and debilitating about their respective freedoms. It’s not freedom at all.

4.5/5 Stars

Le Bonheur (1965): Varda’s Sunshine Horror Film

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The aesthetic of Agnes Varda’s Le Bonheur is strikingly deliberate. Her title cards are filled with sunflowers. All her characters — members of a lovely little family — wear a rainbow of colors. There’s a verdant gaiety to the forest landscape around them. The score comprised of the buoyant elegance of Mozart does wonders to accentuate this very salient mood. In short, it’s gorgeous. Surely this is happiness personified.

In the middle of the 1960s, that turbulent time of upheaval and the nouvelle vague, it deigns to be domestic and cheerful in a way Godard would never dare and Truffaut could only manage through a boyish point of view.

But it has such a vibrant and daring color palette on par with anything in Contempt (Bardot included), Pierrot Le Fou or Weekend. In fact, this could very well be her answer to a glorious Jacques Demy musical (her husband) and a predecessor to Stolen Kisses and Bed and Board.

The couple’s children are adorable as they toddle around, ride in the back of the family truck or feed sugar cubes to their daddy’s horse — the bicycle he rides home from work every afternoon. Like any young kids, they like to imagine, they’re enthralled by a newborn baby, and they take naps (under the mosquito netting their mother puts out in the forest for them).

By this point, the movie could feel sickening and twee, but there’s an impulse to see the movie out and where it might go. It leaves some questions about a dramatic situation with its title (especially with how fiercely unironic it resolves to be from the outset).

When they return home to their idyllic town, it’s little different. True, the husband, Francois (Jean-Claude Drouot), wants to see a western at the cinema — a prototypical American film. His wife Therese (Claire Drouot) is enchanted by a French film, the first pairing of “[Bridgette] Bardot and [Jeanne] Moreau.” Otherwise, they seem perfectly aligned, going to work and raising their family together.

This all quite effectively lulls us into a false sense of security. Varda knows quite well what she’s doing. As an audience, we want to believe this is what life is like, but we are privy to a movie and so something must change…If there is a source of drama, it’s when the man starts to flirt with a local telephone operator Emilie (Marie-France Boyer). Even this tête-à-tête is light and affable. They feel innocent enough. Hardly prepared to wreck a home.

His wife and his lover aren’t mirror images exactly — they look different — but Varda does very little to distinguish their visible traits (ie. blonde vs. brunette or juxtaposed costuming choices).  They’re both pretty young blondes, affable, draped in bright colors. It feels like a curious coincidence until it builds into something more.

This trifling love affair morphs into exactly the kind of circumstances the exterior does its best to dispel. Surely infidelity does not have license to break into such reverie and tear a family apart. This does not fit with the perfect marital equation or the glorious mise en scene.

So we begin to discover a kind of perturbing even disheartening dissonance about the picture as it continues to break with reality. It builds and begins to ambush us with new contradictions.

Here is a man deliriously happy, both with his wife and then with another woman. He assures his new love, “I have enough joy for both of you. Happiness works by addition.” Then when he cordially breaks it to his wife he says, It’s as if he has 10 arms to love her and he has extra arms (to love someone else).

It doesn’t matter how emphatically or candidly he says those words. They come off poorly. Even as he continues to live in his rapturous dream world without consequence, for the first time the words ring out in the landscape with an inherent hollowness. It’s yet another signal of paradise lost. We have hit upon a point of no return.

Le Bonheur is devastating in a manner that I never would have imagined. Because Varda finally does allow the film’s glorious bliss to crack even if the tone and coloring never waver or fade. The way the young carpenter relives one horrifying moment over and over again in front of the camera feels reminiscent of C.S. Lewis when he wrote about grief and how “The same leg is cut off time after time.”

However, now we have a suspicion of where it might go. The final few minutes of Le Bonheur are not a total surprise; they do feel like a shocking betrayal of our initial assumptions. This is not a criticism; it simply shows how effectively the movie evolves over time while maintaining a certain surface-level palatability. It’s ceaselessly beautiful to look at even as the currents turn.

Whatever its reputation, Le Bonheur feels commensurate with some of the most unnerving psychological horror films and thrillers I’ve seen through the ages. I think of the uneasy denouement of Gone Girl or the unsettling conspiracies in Rosemary’s Baby or Get Out. The curious part is how the perpetrators have no idea what they have done. It’s not a film of premeditated plots, more “happy” accidents, and this in itself is terrifying.

Because we have the same set dressings, the same motifs — almost everything feels the same — but we have an entirely different context. If we’ve settled back into a comforting equilibrium, then something almost imperceptible grates at us. Something has soured with the happiness set before us. It establishes a level of disquietude I won’t forget for some time. Surely something is not right here. I leave it to each viewer to reconcile it for themselves.

4/5 Stars

La Pointe Courte (1955): Agnes Varda and The French New Wave

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Agnes Varda became a modern-day cinema celebrity in the 21st century thanks to her immediately recognizable profile and modern incarnations of her work like Vague Visages. Because it’s true she never stopped creating, never ceased exploring this terrestrial sphere.

Watching something like La Pointe Courte (1955), one of her early efforts, one begins to imagine and reconfigure how the movie canon gets forged. Some of it has to do with accessibility (Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7 seems to gain a resurgence in popularity by the year).

But whereas 400 Blows, Hiroshima Mon Amour, and Breathless became the lodestars for an entire seismic shift in film, Varda is rarely considered in this dialogue. If at all, it’s in tandem with Alain Resnais or her husband Jacques Demy from the Left Bank who were contemporaries of The filmmakers from Cahiers du Cinema. But never is Varda mentioned as a predecessor or the initial pioneer of forthcoming movements and yet she shot a film with little money, passion, and a point of view.

Early on as we glide down the alleyway with the laundry swaying in the breeze I couldn’t help but think how Yasujiro Ozu would have photographed it so differently — stagnant and beautiful — still, Varda makes it feel graceful and alive.

She uses it as a way to get into the house. There’s a man loitering around on the corner, we see boats in the background, and then we’re past the very same laundry through the window into the home of a working-class family.

The stranger by the fig tree has the locals suspicious. They snatch a glance at him, suspecting he’s an inspector come to turn them in. Sure enough, health services show up to pay a house call.

This is a story of the steady degradation of a way of life. These men earn their livelihood through fishing. But with the local bodies of water increasingly polluted, the authorities are quick to come down on them. Young children are tasked with keeping watch and sounding the alarm so the men can rush back to shore and hide their spoils. But the antiquated ways of kids keeping watch don’t stand a chance against newfangled motorboats. Later a man is taken off to prison for such an infraction.

A movie like this looks deceptively simple and yet I’m able to pore over it with such relish. Look at the street, the shape of a tree, some bit of wood, or fishing equipment tossed on the ground. None of this can be fabricated on a green screen. This is a unique and real-world before us that we get to feel and experience in all of its immediate eccentricities.

The way a cat crawls through a hole in a wooden fence. Women crowd in the doorway to acknowledge the death of a child. A man skipping over the train tracks to greet his love. The reunited lovers walking along a stone wall or crouched in the enormous darkened hull of a boat.

Because La Pointe Courte also tells of a Parisian couple (Silvia Monfort and Philippe Noiret), who have returned to the husband’s childhood home. They have different philosophies. For him, it is simple but the lap of contentment. Just living is a pleasure. He can be satisfied here.

His ambitions lie with the intricate, extraordinary things — the kind of everyday visions that prove plentiful in Varda’s gaze, but his woman wants something else. She wants to travel — to see more than the humble alleyways of his small backwater town.

We might liken her to a connoisseur of Hollywood delicacies. Although they are not a pair of Hollywood faces and Varda’s camera finds them immeasurably interesting. She photographs and frames them in all manner of ways: profiles, from up above, side by side, and walking apart. It makes no difference. They are totally worthy of her close consideration.

I find it easy to reminisce about Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli another film that ties together the worlds of fishing and apathetic romance. There are even touches of  Ingmar Bergman from the boating of Summer with Monika and the visual melding of two human beings in Persona.

It also features water jousting a generation before Cesar et Rosalie. But one must once again acknowledge the imprint of Resnais — he helped edit the picture — and La Pointe Courte predates such seismic works as Hiroshima Mon Amour or Last Year at Marienbad.

This is not an empirical observation but although both their films share momentarily visible sensibilities — how they glide through space — allowing lovers ample opportunity to quibble poetically if not totally inexplicable, Varda seems more invested in the world around them.

These are still real people to her with real problems, not merely the symbols or totems of countries and generations (ie. Nevers and Hiroshima). And so although Resnais’s characters share some intimacies, Varda’s picture is intimate in a different way, allowing for understanding outside the umbrella of romance alone.

She’s intent on humanity — a little boy licking his ice cream cone — in a way Resnais probably wouldn’t devote time to. The moment develops into something bitter and then sweet. He thinks his woman has left him and then she returns with two ice creams (economy size). He gives his cone to a small child. Rather than a mere act of charity or guilt, he’s probably lost any appetite.

The movie is this constant dance between signs of dissolution — these steps back and apart — and then steps forward leading them together again. It’s romance played out in the moments of conversation and indifference rather than any form of malicious Hollywood tirade.

It’s telling Varda ends her movie, not with her couple pontificating as they wade through a local dance party in the streets. For them, it’s practically a joyous occasion. However, she leads us back to a family as they get in their boat to ride off into the distant night. It never loses this level of familiarity in its humble origins. It relishes them even as it signals the inevitable dwindling of a way of life. Whether Varda recognized it or not, her film remains a presage for coming attractions.

4/5 Stars.

Confidentially Yours (1983): Fanny Ardant, Hitchcock, and Truffaut

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This is my Entry in the Classic Movie Blog Association’s Fall Blogathon Movies are Murder!

Although no one knew it at the time, Confidentially Yours would become the makeshift curtain call to Francois Truffaut’s career as he died of a brain tumor shortly thereafter. The movie in no way makes up for the works we lost out on, but there are some fitting summations worth appreciating. Truffaut cast his latest muse, Fanny Ardant, in the lead role — subverting the prototypical blonde Hitchocockian heroine.

Like her predecessors, Ardant is winsome and brave, whether in stage garb or a trenchcoat in the tradition of noir working girls like Ella Raines or even Grace Kelly. They’re capable of being both intrepid and alluring on screen as the dauntless motor behind the story.

It’s true the film’s plot, execution, and sense of style owe a debt of gratitude to Truffaut’s cinematic hero. Like Alfred Hitchcock’s film Stage Fright, Confidentially Yours covers murder and the performative aspects surrounding it.

There’s a kind of duality because Ardant is not only a secretary embroiled in a local murder, but also moonlights as a stage performer at night even as she dons various parts throughout the movie to aid in her detective work. Much of this fades away as mere pretense as we get deeper and deeper into the nitty-gritty world of old-fashioned noir.

Confidentially Yours boasts a brisk beginning befitting a more contemporary film: A man is brutally shot out at a pond, and there’s only one obvious suspect. Truffaut implicates his own star through the cut because the first image we see after a bloody murder by a faceless perpetrator is Jean-Louis Trinitnant walking back to his car. He sees a nearby car door left ajar, and he closes it before returning to his own vehicle and driving off. When the police come to question him later, he seems to slip up in his story.

Surely he’s a guilty party. He has motive. His wife was unfaithful, and now one of her many boyfriends is dead. What’s more, Trintignant plays him as a brusque character — he’s not winning any awards for likeability — and yet these are not the metrics for guilt and innocence as we’re probably already all aware of. To use a staid figure of speech, people are often more than meets the eye.

Also, there’s the question about fingerprints. He left them all over the crime scene. Either he’s an incalculable fool or there’s more to the story. Ardant occupies an unenviable position. She seems to be working for a guilty party, she’s given the ax by her embittered employer, and yet she still finds some compulsion to begin poking around.

She starts sleuthing, coming into contact with a melange of lawyers, policemen, and shadowy undesirables. It’s easy to get bogged down by what feels like an incomprehensible cascade of plotting, but isn’t this the point? It’s not the particulars but the means of getting there proving the most important, and Ardent is one of the most supernal vessels we could possibly imagine. Somehow she seems like the predecessor of Hayley Atwood with the poise of Isabella Rossellini thrown in for good measure.

One of the film’s other lasting assets is the gorgeous monochromatic tones of Nestor Almendros. It proves to be an immaculate act of mimesis plucking the movie out of the ’80s and allowing it to drift into that timeless era of yesteryear that only lives in the thoughts and recollections of our elders who experienced the world and dreamed in black and white.

As her employer stays mostly anonymous behind his shuttered-up storefront, Ardant becomes his hands and feet, searching out a ticket taker at a movie house, and then leading to a nightclub. Later, she looks to infiltrate a prostitution ring using all her wiles to spy out the window of the lavatory. Eventually, her tenacity is rewarded, and she does what the police seem incapable of through normal channels.

Truffaut for me will always be one of the most ardent cinephiles with the likes of Martin Scorsese and a handful of others. Men who often made fantastic, exhilarating films, but not out of a debt to mere craftsmanship or technique. It’s so palpable how much they love these things. Their films can’t help but smolder with a boyish fanaticism they were never quite able to shake.

Scorsese still seems to make a young man’s movies with an old man’s themes, and even though we lost Truffaut at 53, hardly in the autumn of his life, he had some of the same proclivities. He loves the genre conventions of old. There’s almost a giddy enthusiasm to do his own Hitchcock movies like Shoot The Piano Player, Mississippi Mermaid, The Bride Wore Black or even this final entry.

And yet on the other end of the spectrum with the likes of Antoine Doinel, The Wild Child, and Pocket Money, he managed to tap into these deep reservoirs of emotional soulfulness. It feels as if adolescence is incarnated and imbued with empathy by someone who never quite left that life behind.

Since Godard still manages to have an influence on cinema culture as one of the revered old guard throughout this century, it remains a shame we lost Truffaut so prematurely. He still lives on through his films and the admiration of others like Steven Spielberg, but I do feel like if he was still alive today, his love of the movies would be equally infectious if not more so. I suppose it makes the catalog he left behind all the more important.

I didn’t consider until this very moment, but with “confidentially yours” the director is leaving us with his final valediction before signing off. It seems fitting his complementary farewell drips with the pulp sentiments he relished starring a lady whom he loved.

4/5 Stars

Note: This review was originally written before the passing of Jean-Luc Godard on September 13, 2022.

Masculin Feminin (1966): The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola

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“Times had changed. It was the age of James Bond and Vietnam.”

The film opens with a casual conversation between two young people: the young man, Paul (Jean-Pierre Leaud), bugs the girl, Madeleine (Chantal Goya), sitting across the way. Then, this conversation between young people in a cafe gets rudely interrupted by a marital spat that ends in a gunshot. Surely these are Godard’s proclivities at work.

One could say form follows function. Masculin Feminin is another reminder of how literary his cinema is. We often think of his films for their visual aesthetic thanks to the likes of Raoul Coutard (or Willy Kurant here). There’s no denying this, but they are always so pregnant with ideas and thoughts, some fully formed others feel like they were scribbled out on a notepad (because they were). It’s a task to be inundated with it all as he willfully challenges any level of perspicuity.

However, whether you venerate or loathe Godard, his cinema is a tapestry woven together from all his influences. It feels like dialectical cinema where everything is a symposium of love, arts, and politics as young people converse with explosive intertitles blasting away between scenes. But that doesn’t mean everything is a logical progression. Godard gives himself license to follow every passing whim.

Other times it’s uncomfortably direct. Leaud as his avatar starts interrogating Madeleine as she powders her face, but he gets away with it, since he’s always idealistic and a bit of a romantic. He asks her, “What’s the center of the world?” When pressed, he thinks it’s “Love” and she would have said “Me.”

Eventually, he spends more time with her and gets to know her roommates too, and he finds a new job polling the public. Leaud “polls” Ms. 19 giving her a line of probing, deeply personal questions. Later, he has a whole conversation about mashed potatoes and a father discovering how the earth orbits around the sun.

Godard is always in conversation with the films that inform him, but with Masculin Feminin we see a much broader acknowledgment and exploration of the contemporary culture. Madeleine’s meteoric rise as a Ye-Ye singer finds her on the charts in Japan only surpassed by The Beatles, Frances Gall, and Bob Dylan. Not bad!

That’s also not to say Godard gives up being in dialogue with films as well, including his own, which had become part of the cultural conversation in their own right.  Bridgitte  Bardot (from Contempt) shows up receiving notes from her director. Madeleine playfully chastises her beau, “You’re not Pierro Le Fou. He stole cars for his woman!”

Later, they sit in a darkened theater together watching a perturbing arthouse movie:

“We went to the movies often. The screen would light up, and we’d feel a thrill. But Madeline and I were usually disappointed. But Madeline and I were usually disappointed. The images were dated and jumpy. Marilyn Monroe had aged badly. We felt sad. It wasn’t the movie of our dreams. It wasn’t the total film we carried inside ourselves. That film we would have liked to make, or more secretly, no doubt, the film we wanted to live.”

If this doesn’t sum up the aspirations of the youth in front of the camera staring up at the screen within the screen, it must hold true for the young batch of filmmakers who Godard himself came up with. It’s a perplexing bit of dialogue and one of the most apparently self-reflexive and personal annotations within the entire picture.

As is, all of Godard’s male heroes and stand-ins feel dense although Leaud is always miraculously able to pull off some boyish prank or a bit of mischief and still maintain some semblance of relatable humanity.

Otherwise, how could girls ever put up with these guys much less love them? All the young women are pestered to no end and rendered endearing for all they must endure. I think of Ms. 19 and Elisabeth (Marlene Joubert) in particular. We pity them.

What do we do with the totality of this picture? From experience, you usually run into issues when you try and find the narrative arc or a conventional form to follow. Because Godard’s films boast so much in ideas, asides, and digressions. There’s so much to be parsed through and digested.

It’s easier to follow impressions, a train of thought here, or a standalone scene there that left some sort of tangible impact. In the social tumult and the moral morass of the 1960s, it’s almost as if within the collage of the film, we’ll find some substantive meaning. Then, again maybe not.

Leaud walks down the street with a girl and pops into a cafe for a moment only to come back out. He continues to walk and says, “Kill a man and you’re a murderer. Kill thousands and you’re a conqueror. Kill everyone and you’re a God.”

She responds, “I don’t believe in God.” Frankly, I don’t blame her, and if that’s the world’s conception of who God is, I wouldn’t want that God either. Still, we all try and answer existential questions with something, be it politics, pop songs, or fleeting teenage romance.

I read Godard’s film was restricted to adult viewers, but he probably thought he was doing a public service announcement for the youth generations in his own individual attempt to put a voice to the times. Whatever your thoughts on Godard or Coca Cola and Marx, alongside British Swinging London time capsules, Masculin Feminin helps capture this particular moment of ’60s European culture in a bottle.

It feels increasingly difficult to reconcile all the warring forces fighting for primacy and as a young person just trying to find love and make sense of one’s life, it’s never easy. We have more questions than answers. However imperfectly, Masculin Feminin synthesizes some aspects of this universal phenomenon, one that’s not totally restricted by time. We can all relate to this idea as long as we were young once.

4/5 Stars

Note: This review was written before the passing of Jean-Luc Godard on September 13, 2022.

Le Petit Soldat (1963)

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“Photography is truth, and cinema is truth 24 times a second.”

Although Le Petit Soldat was released in 1963 — no thanks to the censors — it was actually filmed in 1960. This context is all-important because Jean-Luc Godard is still fresh off the sensibilities of Breathless, and they pervade this film as well.

Its plot follows the aftermath of a professor killed in a terrorist attack and a young journalist in Geneva, who is enlisted by French intelligence to assassinate a man named Palivoda. This is in the age of the Algerian War; the young man, Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor), has avoided the draft, and the man he’s assigned to kill is a National Liberation Front sympathizer.

If it’s not apparent already, the groundwork has been set for a political spy thriller. While balking at murdering the man in a drive by, Bruno simultaneously falls in love with Veronica (Anna Karina), a dark-haired beauty in a trench coat. His friends bet him he’ll fall in love the first time he sees her on the street. He sheepishly shells over the money after only a brief introduction. He’s instantly smitten.

Le Petit Soldat is such a literary film thanks in part to its voiceover. Bruno, as Godard’s stand-in and cinematic conduit, references a myriad of things. He asks rhetorically about Veronica, “Were her eyes Velasquez gray or Renoir gray?”

It’s as if Godard is contemplating the muse in his own art. Still, he continues with a steady stream of namedrops including painters, authors, and composers. Van Gogh and Gauguin. Then, Beethoven and Mozart. Anna Karina prancing around to Joseph Haydn is definitely its own mood.

It occurs to me this is a distillation of Godard as a filmmaker. It’s a visual style wedded with these deeply mined traditions of literature and art.  Both cutting edge and steeped in the culture of the past before thenceforward going off and creating its own unique vocabulary.

Godard gleefully inserts himself all over the movie on multiple occasions where we see him in the flesh. It’s a spy movie as only he can conceive it totally deconstructed and aware of itself while simultaneously taking most of the thrills out of the genre.

Soldat remains a precursor to Alphaville by effectively turning the contemporary world around him into the environment for his latest genre picture. Whereas Breathless‘s jazz-infused contemporary aesthetic is accentuated by the black and white streets of France, here they are repurposed. Though it’s as much a film about driving around the city philosophizing as it is about any specific dramatic action.

Because Francois Truffaut, while not always disciplined, could spin stories with a narrative arc and genuine emotion. Godard is at his best as a philosopher and cinema iconoclast where his style doesn’t totally get bogged down by ideas, and he uses the medium in ways that would become the new standard. Or at least his own standard, before he decided to upend them again.

But in order to make the case for Anna Karina as more than Godard’s Pygmalion, it’s necessary to consider her screen image in depth. Whatever Godard gave to Anna Karina in terms of iconography or legacy, Karina gave that much back, and they will be inextricably linked for all times. Because if there was ever a reason to fall in love with her, it’s right there in Le Petit Soldat.

His alter ego riffs about God and politics, political left and right, quotes Lenin, and unravels his entire worldview (ie. about a man who loves ideas, not territories). When he asks his girl why she loves him, she shrugs her shoulders and says I don’t know. I don’t think she’s dumb, but whereas here we have one character who is in their head, she seems to be a creature who is real and present in the moment. She has a heart.

Whatever the digressions and despite the perplexing way Bruno interrogates her during their impromptu photoshoot, she is undeniable. If cinema is truth 24 frames a second, she somehow makes Godard’s cinema more accessible and real — she takes his theorizing on truth and gives it a pulse.

The movie is still a thriller, and it follows its own version of narrative beats. Bruno is framed, he continually has second thoughts about his assignment; he gets the gun, but things always get in his way. His heart is not in it — killing a man mercilessly — because this is not who he is.

Instead, he wishes to run away to Brazil with his girl. He’s locked away and tortured as a double agent for his troubles. These sequences are simplistic — contained in a hotel bathroom — and yet as they light matches near his fingertips and dunk him for minutes on end in the water, there’s a definite heartless menace about it.

We have the political bent of Godard’s cinema detected early on before his other overt efforts later in the 60s. It comes in the guise of his story as it unpacks current events, ideologies, and even controversy around torture.

True to form, he has the audacity to cram the final act of an entire movie into one minute of celluloid. He shows us some things and just as easily explains away the rest with voiceover.

It feels like he leaves just as he emerged. He’s totally singular. At times, maddening and bombastic, and yet always prepared with his own take and alternative approaches to convention. Godard will always challenge the viewer and make you reconsider how much you appreciate cinema even as he continually helps to redefine how we conceive things.

1960 or 63. It makes no difference. Le Petit Soldat has a young man’s malaise acting as a film for the coagulating disillusionment of the ’60s. This isn’t your father’s war nor one of his films — not the “cinema du papa” as Truffaut put it. If Godard’s style was coming into its own, with Karina cast front and center, then the propagation of his ideas is equally evident. Cinema would not be the same without his distinct point of view.

3.5/5 Stars

Note: This review was written before the passing of Jean-Luc Godard on September 13, 2022.

Cesar et Rosalie (1972)

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It occurs to me that the title Cesar et Rosalie is a rather peculiar choice for this movie. However, it’s also very pointed. If Jules et Jim was about two friends caught in a ceaselessly complicated love affair with one woman (Jeanne Moreau), then here is a story shifting the focus just slightly. This time it is Romy Schneider caught between two suitors.

It opens with two men who both were coupled with the unseen woman named Rosalie. Formerly she was with a handsome comic book artist, but before they could ever get around to marriage (what would have been her second), she ended up with a middle-aged scrap metal man (Yves Montand). He’s quite successful in his trade while maintaining a penchant for gambling.

Whether it’s solely because they are represented by creative types, it feels like there’s a kind of vacuity about the younger generation. Yves Montand, now there is a man with something interesting about him. After doing some digging, I found out he was actually Italian by birth though thanks to his music and acting, he became synonymous with French cinema. Films like Wages of Fear and Le Cercle Rouge work in a pinch. He’s one of France’s indelible faces, and here he is another character with a lumbering larger-than-life posture.

Both a bit of an overgrown baby and a gregarious teddy bear. He can be found smoking his cigars and establishing himself as the life of the party. He loves to vocalize, and in contrast to his rivals, there’s something refreshing about his blustering style. You know what you’re getting.

In comparison, I’m less inclined to be infatuated with any semblance of the bourgeoise milieu as embodied by David (Sami Frey). This might be a poor descriptor because he’s only a comic book artist, albeit a very successful one. But there’s a detached, casual air about him that feels far more refined. It lacks all of the volatile personality exhibited by Cesar. If I speak for myself, Cesar seems like one of the common men.

However, right about now it’s worthwhile to acknowledge a handful of his shortcomings. He’s quite petty and jealous for the affection of Rosalie. In one instance, his childish antics and brazen show of bravado leave them idling in the underbrush at the side of the road. In the aftermath of a convivial wedding party, a game of chicken ensues between him and David becoming a portent for future drama.

Although he and Rosalie have been together for some time, and they have a contentment between them, there is still this lingering sense of individuality. Rosalie is a mother. She has been married before and maintains her own independence. She remains with Cesar mostly because she wants to be, at least for now. That could easily change, and, eventually, it does. Her whims make her alight once more for David because his quiet charms have not atrophied with time. She feels the electricity between them still.

At the midpoint, the picture hits the skids. Cesar’s ugly underbelly comes alive as his transgressions and jealousy take over. He acts as if he owns Rosalie and in one harrowing scene practically throws her out the front door. He’s a wounded brute prone to violence. There’s no way to condone his behavior even as it reflects the toxic social mores of the era (or many eras).

But of course, he can never forget her. He feels lost without her and so he resolves to find her with David. He tracks them out to their beach getaway but instead of coming to have it out once and for all, Cesar returns sheepishly with his tails between his legs. He’s paid for the damages he inflicted, and Rosalie looks over his sorry figure and can hardly contain her amusement.

It’s moments such as these where it becomes apparent how the movie is mostly able to coast on the goodwill of its stars and their various romantic dalliances. Initially, it feels like Romy Schneider spends a great deal of time in the kitchen grabbing drinks and making coffee for her man. However, she’s also a keen observer of male anthropology.

Like Moreau before her, she really does play the deciding part in this film. As much as it seems framed by the male perspective, though our title subjects have shifted slightly, Rosalie does hold a great deal of sway in the story. It does feel like these men need her more than she needs them or, at the very least, she is not willing to settle into this kind of relaxed equilibrium where they exist in a menage a trois without the intimacy.

Is it wrong to consider this the most French of romantic setups? It becomes plainly apparent that this is never just a film about Cesar and Rosalie. There must be parentheses or ampersand including David tacked on the end (or any other love interest for that matter). The film is far more crowded and complicated than a mere romance actuated by two solitary human beings with Sautet crowding the canvas and relational networks of the film with so many ancillary swatches of life.

Although it feels like it’s not about very much, Sautet is able to hone in on this core relationship and tease out both the comedic eccentricities found therein while still leaving us with this kind of wistful resolution. It’s not a tragedy in the same way Truffaut managed when he detonated Jules et Jim, but it leaves us with that sense of regret that love often conjures up in the human heart.

All these characters could have done things differently to patch things up, to stay together, and earn the Hollywoodesque ending. However, what leaves an impression is this kind of pensive anticlimax. It’s a lighter touch than The Things of Life or Max and The Junkman, even as it might owe something to Lubitsch.

3.5/5 Stars