Yeah, yeah, it’s la rentrée and all sorts of flashy new movies
will be vying for your attention. I’d like to start off by recommending
that you see an excellent American film that was made 30 years
ago (“Midnight Cowboy”) and a fine French documentary (“Les Glaneurs
et la glaneuse” or “The Gleaners and I”) that was completed just
a few months ago. Both are outstanding examples of what movies
at their best can be: touching and enlightening, satisfying while
you’re in the theater and memorable once you’ve left it.
Midnight Cowboy
Both a critical and a popular success when it came out in 1969,
“Midnight Cowboy” (Macadam Cowboy) concerns a handsome but none-too-bright
country boy named Joe Buck (Jon Voight), who arrives in the big
city naively assuming wealthy Manhattan women will fall all over
him if he gives them half a chance. While his stud business sputters,
Joe is befriended by a street-smart, ultimately endearing weasel
known as Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman). Their adventures in the
mostly seamy reaches of New York are as entertaining as they are
poignant. Director John Schlesinger captures a moment in manners
(the film’s swinging party sequence alone is a ’60s time capsule)
that deepens a melancholy character study brimming with earned
emotion. One of the film’s many qualities is that it’s a movie
for grown-ups. It was, in fact, rated “X” — and went on nonetheless
to win Oscars for best picture, director and screenplay (for Waldo
Salt’s adaptation of James Leo Herlihy’s novel). (Aug 30 at the
Action Ecoles in the 5e)
Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse
With a lifetime of trained observation on her side and a digital
video camera in her hand, Agnès Varda has crafted a delightful
yet profound meditation on ancient traditions as they come to
bear on modern consumer society, particularly when it comes to
waste and recycling. Gleaning, set down in legal codes for nearly
500 years, is the practice of picking up potatoes or collecting
bunches of grapes left behind after the official harvest is over.
Varda roams the French countryside interviewing people who glean
because they like to and those who glean because their survival
depends upon it. She finds a vintner who is also a psychoanalyst
and another whose property includes the bunker from which Etienne-Jules
Marey recorded some of his spectacular filmed motion experiments.
She speaks with a man who claims he has lived exclusively on discarded
food on principle, for over a decade, even though he could easily
afford to buy his vittles. Varda seeks out an artist who uses
discarded materials in his artwork; it’s a priceless moment when
he shows her the chart from city hall listing days when artists
can gather stuff off the streets and she gently corrects him,
saying, “Those are actually the days it’s okay to discard stuff
on the street.” Oh yeah, it’s all in how you look at it. Varda
looks at it with humor and poignancy and a photographer’s eye.
It’s a terrific little movie, and one of the only ones so far
(along with Mike Figgis’ “TimeCode”) to fully exploit the advantages
of digital video without once making the viewer pine for the intrinsic
beauty of celluloid. (Currently playing with English subtitles
at the MK2 Beaubourg, next to the Pompidou Center)
Harry, un ami qui vous veut du bien
“Harry, un ami qui vous veut du bien” (Harry, He’s Here to Help)
is a very neatly made little psychological thriller in the Hitchcockian
mold. Michel (Laurent Lucas), a put-upon husband and father, is
en route to his ramshackle vacation home with his family when
he happens to run into Harry (Sergi López), an independently wealthy
former classmate, in a rest stop washroom. Harry, traveling with
his adoring young girlfriend Plum (Sophie Guillemin, the unfettered
cutie pie from “L’Ennui,” who proves she’s a real actress and
no one-film fluke), insinuates himself into the lives of Michel
and his wife Claire (Mathilde Seigner) the way grappling hooks
insinuate their way into pay dirt. Harry hates problems of any
sort and has a novel way of solving most of them.
Delectably dark yet consistently funny, this film premiered at
Cannes, where everyone agreed it was keenly written, nicely shot,
beautifully acted and thoroughly entertaining. It wasn’t artsy-fartsy,
it didn’t bite off more than it could chew, it wasn’t out to rewrite
filmmaking rules. It was just a good French movie, one for which
it was worth getting up to go to an 8:30am press screening. A
few days later I struck up a conversation with an usher in her
early 20s, a local lass working at the festival for the first
time. “So, do you get to see any of the movies?” I asked. Yes,
a few. She’d seen Brian de Palma’s “Mission to Mars” and enjoyed
it quite a bit. “How about ‘Harry.’ Did you see ‘Harry’?” I asked.
She screwed up her face a bit, as if I’d asked an American 6-year-old
if she wanted more intestines with her snails, and said, “Yes,
I saw it. But that’s a very strange movie. You have to be a little
sick to make a movie like that — or to want to watch it.” (Aug 16)
Fast Food, Fast Women
“Fast Food, Fast Women” is a modest but engagingly well-observed
comedy about Bella (Anna Thomson), a single waitress who’s about
to turn 35 — and seems to have an endearing personality quirk
for every one of her trips around the sun. Presented in competition
at Cannes, “Fast Food, Fast Women” marks a surprising change for
writer-director Amos Kollek and one-of-a-kind actress Thomson,
who previously collaborated together on two radically downbeat
films: the wrenching and magnificent “Sue” (“Sue Perdue dans Manhattan”
— still playing after two years) and “Fiona.” The lives of Bella’s
mostly over-the-hill customers at the downtown diner where she
works figure prominently in this sweet, silly saga of Manhattanites
who yearn for affection in the face of insular city life. Nicely
paced and thoroughly enjoyable, this little picture has a generosity
toward its flawed, ever-so-human characters that put me in a good
mood. May it do the same for you. (Sept 6)
L’Affaire Marcorelle
If your French is up to snuff, this sly tale of ambient guilt
is a hoot. The inimitable Jean-Pierre Leaud stars as an investigating
magistrate who has in many ways outgrown the fervor of his student
revolutionary days and suspects he’s in danger of becoming a bourgeois
fuddy-duddy. Without meaning to, he gets mixed up with a foreign
waitress (Irène Jacob, in a funny, flexible performance) and becomes
convinced that he’s killed a man. But there’s no body. Speaking
of culpability real or imagined, guilty pleasures abound here
for hardcore film buffs, but the movie, written and directed by
Serge Le Péron, also works as a wacky thriller for people who
wouldn’t recognize an “hommage” if it stabbed them in the chest.
(Sept 13)
The Golden Bowl
(La Coupe d’or)
Now that everybody and his brother’s a millionaire, Henry James’
tale of the women orbiting retired tycoon and “first American
millionaire” Adam Verver (Nick Nolte) could have seemed dated,
but... Hey, wait a minute! Hardly anybody’s a millionaire and
this story of love and money may be a period picture but its underlying
motivations are as fresh as the euros being struck at the mint
these days.
It is tiresome to hear people dismiss a perfectly worthwhile venture
as “a Merchant-Ivory movie,” as if that were the moral equivalent
of stultifying crimes against art and literature. This latest
literary adaptation, from the novel James proclaimed to be “the
best book I have ever done,” is full of subtleties and betrayals
and ends up being more delectably perverse than most of the goings-on
in the rather lackluster “Sade” (released Aug 23).
Verver, a widower from a Midwestern community called “American
City,” is living in London with his devoted, beloved daughter
Maggie (Kate Beckinsale). She is about to marry Prince Amerigo
(Jeremy Northam), a genuine aristocrat whose bank account is in
inverse proportion to his considerable charm. The fly in the turn-of-the-century
ointment is that Amerigo was deeply in love with another American
abroad, Charlotte Stant (Uma Thurman), but they broke off their
affair because she, too, was penniless. These four characters
evolve in tantalizing ways between 1902 and 1909, with friend
and confidante Fanny Assingham (Angelica Huston) trying to keep
complicated lives simple in the best interests of all concerned. (Sept 13)
On the Run
New York-based Portuguese filmmaker Bruno de Almeida has done
a very nice job with the mismatched-buddy movie “On the Run,”
in which a law-abiding nebbish is drawn into the problematic antics
of a childhood friend who has recently escaped from jail. New
York is portrayed as a place where anything can happen — and often
does as the two men careen across town from odd incident to tight
squeeze. (Sept 20)
