• Le Samouraï

7/17/22 (Sun)

Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 take on a noir thriller. Alain Delon plays a cooler-than-cool killer-for-hire, dapper in his trench coat and stylish hat, who plays a cat-and-mouse game with the police after his murder of a nightclub owner. He is a taciturn type who lets his gun do the talking and has carefully set up alibis before carrying out the job, but he is spotted by a witness, a jazz singer in the club, upon leaving the scene. He refrains from killing her and quickly leaves, and she responds by denying to the police that this is the man she saw. Contradictory evidence complicates the picture for the police, but the noose eventually tightens. Delon moves ultimately to fulfill a final contract, which involves killing the singer. He goes to the club in a tense scene for a surprising ending.

A better title for the film would be “Le Yakuza”. Delon’s actions are not the behavior of a samurai, who is devoted solely to his master and would never stoop (at least ideally) to monetary gain. Continue reading →

• Toivon tuolla puolen (The Other Side of Hope)

6/4/22 (Sat)

In Aki Kaurismäki’s Le Havre (2011), an older working-class man losing his wife to cancer encounters an African migrant fleeing the law and works to help him. In his The Other Side of Hope (2017), an older working-class man losing his wife to divorce encounters a Syrian migrant fleeing the law and works to help him. The setting shifts from Le Havre to Helsinki and the language from French to Finnish/English/Arabic, but the big change is the shift in focus from the rescuer to the rescued, who is drawn more sharply and plays a more active role in the latter film. Significantly, the first film is about ensuring that the migrant leaves France and reaches the UK, while the second is about welcoming migrants into the society in question.

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• Seconds

6/5/22 (Sun)

A bizarre SF offering of 1966 by John Frankenheimer that is known popularly as the last of his “paranoia trilogy” with The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May. The film was not a success on its initial release – it was actually booed at Cannes – but has gained growing cult status over the years. A tired banker receives a call from a friend who he thought had died. The friend reveals that he has been given the chance at a “rebirth” by a mysterious company — known as The Company — that offers a new appearance and identity through plastic surgery. He  raves about his reenergized life and offers to introduce the banker as well. The banker reluctantly accepts. Having been an amateur painter, he is given the identity of a noted artist and relocated to an upscale community in Malibu. He meets a beautiful bohemian woman and initially enjoys a wild ride. But, as these things go, he soon discovers that not all is as it seems and wants out. Unfortunately, that proves easier said than done. A shocking betrayal at the end brings his dream to a vicious close.

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• La Promesse (The Promise )

7/8/22 (Fri)

The Dardenne brothers’ breakout film of 1996. Continue reading →

• Le Jeune Ahmed (Young Ahmed)

6/25/22 (Sat)

The Dardenne brothers’ 2019 film starts in the middle: when we meet Ahmed, an introverted Belgian teenager, he has already come under the spell of a charismatic imam and is becoming increasingly radicalized. He berates his mother for drinking wine and his sister for dressing like a normal Belgian girl, and refuses to shake his teacher’s hand because she teaches Arabic through popular song rather than the Koran and, worse, is dating a Jew. He eventually decides to cure the teacher by killing her. Continue reading →

• Close-Up

6/19/22 (Sun)

Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami based his 1990 maybe-it-was-maybe-it-wasn’t documentary on a true case in which an unemployed man managed to enter the lives of an upper-middle-class family by impersonating a famous film director. The setup recalls the stage show Six Degrees of Separation, where a black man claiming to be the son of Sidney Poitier puts one over on a wealthy white family – in fact, both shows oddly appeared in the same year. The latter, also based loosely on a true story, was a satiric jab at upper class pretensions in an artsy New York household, with a racial dimension to boot. Close-Up goes a step beyond that in using the actual people involved in the case in a semi-real, semi-staged format. Moreover, the focus is on the poor rather than the rich as the young man uses his deceit in an attempt to find dignity in his life.

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• Le Havre

5/7/22 (Sat), home

A charming offbeat 2011 French-language comedy by Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki. Marcel Marx (André Wilms, wonderful), whose character has gone from bohemian author in a previous film (La Vie de Bohème) to shoeshine man in the port city of Le Havre, comes across a young African migrant on the run from immigration authorities. When the kid follows him home, Marcel decides to help, hiding the boy in his small home to keep him out of the clutches of a Javert-like inspector. Some detective work by Marcel, using scraps of information and a quick trip to a migrant camp in Calais, reveals that the boy’s mother is living in London. The question then becomes how to smuggle the kid to the UK amid the watchful eyes of authorities, not least how to raise the money to accomplish that. Continue reading →