Change Your Image
mmmopens
Reviews
Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud (1995)
Heart-stoppingly wonderful
How many film-makers make their greatest masterpiece as their last film? Not many, but to that select list, add Claude Sautet. Nelly & M. Arnaud is exquisite.
It is cinema.
This is to say that, in common with most truly and unquestionably great films, it could not exist with such power in any other art. The most difficult and also the most wonderful films are the films that take place, primarily in their character's hearts. It was not important what Charles Foster Kane *did*, but what he felt. In this film too, we experience the primacy of human feelings.
We do this through two luminous performances that reveal just how coarse is the acting that we habitually see in block-buster movies. One of the many deep emotions that overcame me when I first saw this film was that sheer privilege to see such acting.
To see the very gradual, subtle and beautiful love that develops between the two central characters is to get a glimpse of heaven. A film, then, not of love, but the possibility of love, and a warning without didacticism that we all should grasp love if we are given the opportunity.
Perhaps the greatest joy of cinema is its ability to allow us to experience rare emotion. This wonderful, wonderful film does that in an effortless way, without sentimentality, and for that we should be eternally grateful. Thank you M. Sautet, wherever you may be.
El Dorado (1966)
Close to perfection...
Though I would never consider this the greatest film ever made - it hasn't the purity of Bresson, the ambition of Welles or the humanity of Renoir, it is, as I write in spite of being regarded by many as an inferior remake of 'Rio Bravo', my 'favourite' film of the maybe 10,000 I have seen over the last 35 years. The word that I would use to characterise it is 'wisdom'. This film (along with Dreyer's Gertrud from the same era) shows how a great director in the twilight of his career can monumentalise a simple theme with the wisdom of age. The theme of the film is much more than Hawks' normal 'male love story'. But the thematic side of the film is so multi-faceted that it it almost giddying in its complexity. Loyalty, greed, the cruelty of fate, and the relationship between youth and experience are all explored in a rich situation that grows more profound at every viewing.
This brilliant, brilliant film is, amazingly, all the greater by being shot through with humour. It is enlivened by unforgettable minor characters - Bull, Mississippi - enhanced by Nelson Riddle's heroic soundtrack - but, above all monumentalised by the playing of Wayne and Mitchum, and Hawks' matchless mise en scene. If you don't see it you are missing one of life's finest experiences.
The Adventurer (1917)
Oh Charlie, how wonderful
When I was a young boy (about five years old), my parents couldn't afford a TV and, in order to give me entertainment, my dad bought a second hand silent cine projector and showed me some silent westerns (which I have all but forgotten) and - oh joy, oh bliss - the Essanay and Mutual Chaplin films. The greatest of these - by a long way, in my estimation is 'The Adventurer' indeed, it is one of the very few short films worthy of the term 'masterpiece'.
The Adventurer is a sonata on the number 3. There are three main locations - the beach, the pier and the house. The cliff location in the beach scene is triangular, Charlie and his two pursuers make an hilarious trio, with every combination of characters and apexes of the triangle being explored...
Then we go onto the pier... There we have three sub-locations - the top of the pier, the car and the sea. Charlie explores all of these and then moves onto the house.
Here we also have three locations - upstairs, downstairs and the terrace. You can see dozens of other 'threes' in the film, but the coda, in which Charlie is chased three times round the set is like the delirious coda to Mozart's 41st Symphony when the orchestra seem to take off. There is noting like it in all cinema.
Of course I had no idea about all this subtlety when I was a kid, I just looked and laughed in wonder and said with a pleading thrill in my voice.... 'Play it again, Dad.'
Without these wonderful Chaplin films, I doubt that I would have given my life to the cinema for the last fifty years.
The Last Days of Disco (1998)
Oh joy, oh bliss...
Third chronologically, but second logically of a divine trilogy, this look at the cusp between youth and adulthood in 80s New York shows Whit Stillman's Metropolitan wasn't just a flash in the pan, and 'Barcelona' didn't signal a slow decline. Gorgeous characterisation with magic Chloë Sevigny shining from her every frame. And if, like me, you though disco music was crass, this elevates it to another plane... A film for all ages.
Metropolitan (1989)
The whole gamut from haunting to hilarious
I guess I have seen three or four hundred 'first films' of young American directors in the last couple of decades. None has given me such a sense of euphoria that Metropolitan did. It stands in a very high position in that much neglected and un-nameable genre that presents us with a bunch of totally unlovable characters and then proceeds to make us love them.
That may have started with La Regle du Jeu, but Stillman handles this so well, he should not blush at the reference.
La règle du jeu (1939)
Humblingly wonderful
How can words do justice to this dream of a film? It is one of a dozen or so movies in all film history where just everything seems to have gone right. The casting is perfect, it is technically so seamless to make discussion of that side of the film crass, and the script is one of the great narratives in any medium of its century. The characterisation is absolutely matchless. I cannot think of a film with characters as rich as Lisette, the maid, la Chesnaye, the unfaithful aristocrat, Marceau the poacher, and, above all, Renoir's bumbling Octave who sets the tragic events in motion. Great dramatic art, of which this is arguably the cinema's finest example, is usually characterised by irony. La Règle du Jeu has it in spades. In the sensational final 25 minutes, when enemies become friends, and friends enemies, the cinema seems to take off in flight raising this great art to undreamed of heights. It is just so perfect, it makes you want to weep.
El Dorado (1966)
Close to perfection...
Though I would never consider this the greatest film ever made - it hasn't the purity of Bresson, the ambition of Welles or the humanity of Renoir, it is, as I write in spite of being regarded by many as an inferior remake of 'Rio Bravo', my 'favourite' film of the maybe 10,000 I have seen over the last 35 years. The word that I would use to characterise it is 'wisdom'. This film (along with Dreyer's Gertrud from the same era) shows how a great director in the twilight of his career can monumentalise a simple theme with the wisdom of age. The theme of the film is much more than Hawks' normal 'male love story'. But the thematic side of the film is so multi-faceted that it it almost giddying in its complexity. Loyalty, greed, the cruelty of fate, and the relationship between youth and experience are all explored in a rich situation that grows more profound at every viewing.
This brilliant, brilliant film is, amazingly, all the greater by being shot through with humour. It is enlivened by unforgettable minor characters - Bull, Mississippi - enhanced by Nelson Riddle's heroic soundtrack - but, above all monumentalised by the playing of Wayne and Mitchum, and Hawks' matchless mise en scene. If you don't see it you are missing one of life's finest experiences.
Topsy-Turvy (1999)
A rare film exposé of the creative process.
In spite of feeling for much of the second half like a less accessible version of Forty Second Street, Mike Leigh's new film must count as his best. Blessed with sumptuous sets and a 'made to be filmed' slice of 19th Century cultural life, he has worked his special magic in making an enormous cast of unpleasant characters seem wholly lovable. Best of all is Jim Broadbent as Gilbert directing a simple scene in a rehearsal room. There has been no better filmic representation of the joint creative process since La Nuit Americaine.
Angela's Ashes (1999)
A great piece of work, but strangely unmoving
Given Alan Parker's remarkable directorial ability, that Frank McCourt's heart-rending auto-biographical novel fails to raise a tear on the screen, is very strange. However, there are plenty of laughs and magnificent characterisations in the films two and a half hours.
It must always be incredibly difficult for film-makers trying to represent growing up, and having to use two of more child actors. The results here are uneven, but generally fine.
For me the great quality of the film is its visual consistency - giving a real sense of the passing of time and the changes in perception of a maturing consciousness.
I'd certainly recommend the film...
The End of the Affair (1999)
Sensational return to form by Neil Jordan
Is Neil Jordan the right director to adapt Graham Greene? The End of the Affair shows that he is not just right but near perfect. With a structure that flits backwards and forwards in time with effortless fluency, this magnificent morality play deserves to be seen as one of the defining films of our era.
It is so refreshing to see a film that is not ashamed to actually be about something. So what is it about? The destructive power of jealousy, the fleeting nature of happiness, the power of fiction to monumentalise fact, and the cruelty of God (plus a few more...).
What is strange is that Neil Jordan, prize-winning novelist, seems to make most of his best films from other people's fiction - witness Butcher Boy, Interview with a Vampire, Company of Wolves... (Okay, not The Crying Game).
If the Academy have any sense, he, and some of his actors will be back in L.A. come March.
Stuart Little (1999)
Annie without Annie...
Cute, yes. Technically good, yes. Funny, sometimes. Emotionally rewarding, quite. But Stuart Little is a dead ringer on a plot level for John Huston's film of Annie. Is this dreadful? Maybe not. But after A Bug's Life outrageously plagiarised Seven Samurai without recognition at credit level (as far as I could see), this seems a disturbing trend that could end with some no hoper stealing Citizen Kane lock stock and barrel and setting it in a TV studio.
Au hasard Balthazar (1966)
The zenith of purity in the cinema...
No matter how much one may love the cinema, purity is something that we rarely find on the screen. Wonder, yes. Spectacle, emotion by the bucketload, but purity, very rarely.
And Au Hasard Balthazar is the zenith of purity in the cinema. Through this matchless masterpiece, Bresson has shown us what the cinema might have been if it did not have the crushing obligation to make money.
For many years I regarded this as the greatest film ever made - and it still could deserve that epithet. What is certain is that with Balthazar, Bresson entered a form of expression in cinema that is so profound that it almost burns you to watch it.
Of course it's not about a donkey, but the sins of the world. And it is a measure of Bresson's staggering achievement that at the end of the film you can actually believe that you have witnessed the sins of the world. And it leaves you not shocked, nor angry - though both emotions are entirely appropriate - but numb with a desperate sadness.
On top of all of this, it is also the film which is the subject of probably the finest piece of film criticism in the English language - Andrew Sarris' long and wonderful review of it in The Village Voice on its initial New York release. That ends, 'it stands alone atop one of the loftiest pinnacles of artistically realised emotional experiences.'
And so it does.