A short. Jean-Yves Maginot (Bernard Ménez), who says he's come direct from the Harvard Business School – but surely not the one in Boston? – has been hired at a company as a sales representative, with the aim of going right to the top. From the beginning, when he bumps his car door on a colleague's in the car park, we can see that this is an ambitious idiot, but then this is a Rozier film with him in it. His language used in a letter a secretary takes shorthand from is treated with derision by everyone: he wants to write in an elaborate, pretentious style using multi-syllables. And then there's another scene in which a shorthand typist comes into an office to join the worthy suited and booted in a yellow tee-shirt bearing a huge Mickey Mouse head. It's just the wonderful Rozier!
'IN
This is a little known Chabrol, and not a much appreciated one. The rich Ronald (Jean-Claude Brialy) parks his car in front of the café Le Flore on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and in his absence the young bourgeois Arthur (Charles Belmont) has his mates lift the car from its place so he can put his there instead. On his return, Ronald is jeered at by those on the terrasse. The humiliated Ronald decides to get his revenge by using Amboisine (Bernadette Lafont).
In the book Claude Chabrol, Guy Austin points out that this film shows another of the contrasts between Chabrol himself and his friend Paul Gégauff, with the Arthur character as a version of the young Chabrol ('innocent, reserved, repressed') and the Ronald character as Gégauff ('cynical, charismatic, provocative').
And the central argument is that Mathieu has given the leading role in a film to Minouchette (Anémone), and Brigitte is fuming that he hasn't given it to herself. A long scene in which there is an argument between Brigitte and Anémone is fascinating, as is Louis Garrel's advice given to his son.
This is a marathon (almost three-hour) film based on Québécoise writer Anne Hébert's eponymous novel which in turn is based on a true story. Following from the now disgraced Jutra's successful Mon oncle Antoine, it's not too difficult to discover the reason why this was a box office failure: it's not too easy to follow because it's chopped up, most if not all scenes springing from the main character's mind in an often stream of consciousness style. The fact that it's a historical film set in the 1830s didn't help it any either.
Élisabeth d'Aulnières (Geneviève Bujold) marries the seigneur of Kamouraska Antoine Tassy (Philippe Léotard), and on the face of it it would appear that she's very fortunate in marrying a handsome young man who owns a vast area of land. However, her deflowering is brutal and Élizabeth comes very quickly to realise that she's married a violent drunkard and a frequenter of brothels. She longs to escape, and her family is on her side.
And then along comes her doctor Georges Nelson (Richard Jordan) and they fall in love. The monster must be killed. The servant Aurélie is more or less bribed into doing the deed by giving him a poisoned drink, but it doesn't work. Tassy disappears for some time, Élisabeth is pregant by Georges, and Georges performs the bloody murder. He is disgusted that Élisabeth has had sex with Tassy to make it look as though it's his baby, but anyway now that the impossible love has now become possible, paradoxically it's also now impossible: George flees to the States and to keep up appearances Élisabeth is reluctantly obliged to marry Jérôme (Marcel Cuvelier), which is where the story started: after twenty years of marriage Jérôme is dying and Élizabeth is reflecting on her life.
The film isn't in chronological order, has no dialogue only voiceover, and contains many images dwelling on tiny details, such as dogshit on benches, a cracked coffee bowl, the goose feather on the letter 'F' on the offices of Le Figaro (as on the 'F' on the newpaper itself), etc. There are shots of metro stations, Carré Marigny stamp market, the Champs-Élysées, Franklin-Roosevelt, rubbish bins and much more.
The point where a man finds the boy trying to sleep on a bench, starts asking him questions and then takes him to the nearest police station comes about halfway through and is ony continued at the end, where we see images of a room in the police station and learn that his uncle has been phoned and will come and pick him up in his car.
At no time is there any attempt to reconstruct Perec's flight as a child himself, only memories of places visited, no one interprets him as a boy, and only a few brief images of Perec himself involved in the film are seen: there is only the voiceover, and as Perec's older cousin Lili used to play the piano at Rue de l'Asssomption, as a memory of this, Schumann's Kreisleriana becomes increasingly predominant as soundtrack.
Here we have a film set in the 1930s which is based on the last years of Serge Alexandre Stavisky (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a man of great wealth and power married to the ever-faithful Arlette (Anny Duperey), although he very much has a wondering eye and believes he can influence anyone he pleases because of his position. The film is way too complicated to go into, although Stavisky is a huge fraudster and also a very mentally sick man.
Trotsky was certainly not mentally ill, although the analogy of him with Stavisky is particularly fitting, but not everyone seems to have understood that one.
Complicated as it may be, this is a very long way from the experimental complications of Resnais's earlier Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and : L'Année dernière à Marienbad (1961). A suberb film.
Astruc's Le Rideau cramoisi is a forty-four minute medium length film based on Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's short story from his book Les Diaboliques (1874). There is no dialogue at all, but the story is told by Yves Furet as if he were the Vicomte de Brassard, the man who told him this story of when he was a young officer (played by Jean-Claude Pascal).
As a lieutenant of twenty he once stayed with a couple, played here by Jim Gérald and Marguerite Garcya, whose company he found very boring but only sees them for dinner and souper. And then one day something happens which will have a great effect on him for the rest of his life: the beautiful eighteen-year-old Albertine (Anouk Aimée), the couple's daughter, suddenly appears at the dinner table. Before long she is surreptitiously putting her hand on the officer's, and keeping her foot on his throughout the meal. The young man becomes obsessed, passes Albertine a note, but from then on Albertine for some unknown reason sits not next to the officer but between her parents.
And then the inexplicable happens when Albertine comes to the officer's room and they have passionate sex: she has been very brave to do so as she has to pass through her sleeping parents' room in order to get there. Nevertheless, the young woman regularly turns up for passionate nights every other night: the officer is pretty sure that they don't love each other, and apart from the sex the woman is impassive, so why spoil a good thing?
But on the final night she arrives earlier than usual, more passionate than ever, but then just dies on the bed. The officer makes sure she is in fact dead, thinks of doing away with the body in several ways, even doing away with himself: but what a pointless waste at the age of twenty! In the end he just leaves the house, never to return and never to hear anything of the matter again.
The only survivor of the first brood.
A seventeen-minute short. At first we see an abandoned teddy bear by the roadside, then the lower sections of cars as they bump into each other. As it rains, the teddy bear begins to dissolve a little, as the camera moves out we see a man with a much bloodied face, and rotting cars in a traffic jam. It's now dry and a motorbike seems to be on fire: it carries the mother (Maud Wyler), the father (Sofian Khammes) and their son (Antonin Chaussoy). The father stops the motorbike in a field and the three alight and run towards a house which a number of other people are running towards, although they see that the owners of the house, in a frenzy, are shooting the people down.
The rain is obviously deadly acid, and as the family run the man picks up a corrugated sheet for his wife and son to shelter from while trying to escape. The man begins to bleed heavily as it starts to pour down, and he doesn't make it to the cave where his wife and child are sheltering. Here mother and son take off some of their poisoned clothing, they look at the rain dripping inside the cave and suspect that that too is acid. The mother appears to be dying and the boy walks out into the sunshine, into the devastation, the screen goes black and he says a few times: 'Il y a quelqu'un?" ('Is anyone there?'). This film, made three years after Ses souffles, is far more like the horror genre that his first feature La Nuée will be, although the presence of mother and child is also there as in Ses souffres.
Just Philippot is very much in the news now due to the release of his delayed horror film La Nuée (Swarm). Stretching things, I suppose this twenty-four minute short could be called called a horror film of sorts, although it's really in the vein of a Ken Loach drama about social deprivation.
We first see a birthday party in a house, where Lizon (Candela Cottis) and her mother Karine (Marie Kauffmann) are at Lizon's young friend Marie's, and Lizon gets so excited about birthday wishes that she tries to blow the candles out on the cake, although she's restrained by her schoolfriends. Lizon's birthday too is coming soon, and she wants to have a birthday party. Unfortunately her living conditions make this impossible as she lives in a car with her ferociously independent single mother. Karine works in a supermarket but would prefer to work as a housekeeper or garde d'enfant.
Lizon wants to plan a birthday party with her 'schoolmates' in the car, although perhaps inevitably they criticise her clothes and the smell. So Lizon has a 'party' in the car with just her mother present, although she refuses to blow the candles out as it's not a real party, Karine gets exasperated and walks away and the next thing the car is ablaze. Karine manages to rescue Lizon but the sight of the car in flames is the lasting image in the film that we have. Obviously a promising beginning to film direction.
The title Ses souffles is lost in English as it can obviously apply to breath but there's a pun on s'éssouffle, not only being out of breathe but out of a number of things, such as hope.
This is one of Marcel Carné's last films, and is a gem. And not just because Jacques Brel (as Le Juge d'instruction) and dear Boby Lapointe (as Louis Casso) are in it. An innocent man is murdered here by the cops in the cop station, there are witnesses (one being a minor cop himself), two others in the next door cell who hear the terrible sounds of torture, and as it turns out there was also a prostitute who heard not an interrogation but a murder.
Bernard the judge goes through all the procedures to get the three murderous cops convicted, but he's working against a system which is rigged against justice, which cheats in every way it can, intimidates witnesses into silence and lying, and distorts the truth as much as possible: in fact, as Orwell said, lies are truth and vice versa. If this film doesn't turn you against the corruption of the status quo there's no hope for you.
I'd say that all writing – even biography – is to a large extent autobiographical: we're writing our personal findings, even if they're about someone else, and we select according to own own tastes and opinions, deleting others we don't like or which conflict with our own. If we mention the 'real' name of that someone else, then we expect people to recognise that the person talked about is that same person, although of course we're only giving a biased representation of that person, even if we quote liberally. It's at that point that 'reality' and fiction collide, but what if the artist, the person making the work, calls particular individuals by different names? Is this a collision of 'reality' with fiction, or just fiction tout court?
The noted film director Arnaud Desplechin – perhaps the best of his generation to judge by his professional and amateur reviews – made three films in which Marianne Denicourt was a major actor: the medium-length La Vie des morts (1991), La Sentinelle (1992) and Comment je me suis disputé...(ma vie sexuelle). Denicourt was Desplechin's partner for some years, although how many isn't clear. Certainly by the time of Desplechin's Esther Kahn (2000) she doesn't appear in the casting.
Then in 2004 Desplechin makes the film Rois et reine and there's a huge problem: Denicourt complains that Desplechin has in effect invaded her life and exposed intimate details about it. Rois et reine was released in December 2004, and the co-written book Mauvais génie was published in January 2005.
In April 2006 Desplechin won a court case against Denicourt, in which it was decreed that art isn't life, film doesn't consist of slices of real life. The Nora in Rois et reine isn't Denicourt, and Denicourt wasn't entitled to the 200,000 euros damages she claimed. Interesting.
Denicourt and Perrignon's novel – in which she calls the film director Arnold Duplancher – is therefore booted out of court, irrelevant. Desplechin may have been a little indelicate at times, but... In the book, Juliette Binoche had refused a major part in the film, considering it a 'réglement de comptes' (or settling of debts), seems to have seen Nora as Marianne, but the court has ruled that art is art.
Marianne Denicourt includes a number of letters – either true or false or a mixture of both – between various people, including those of 'Arnaud Duplancher' to herself and a final one of hers to him, 'Duplancher's' letter to her ex-partner Daniel Auteil, etc. 'Duplancher' comes out of the, er, novel, as egotistical, addicted to prescription tranquillisers, hated by everyone apart from himself, a genius perhaps but wildly flawed in personality. This is fascinating reading. One of my favourite comments, and I translate:
'Sometimes, in the privacy of his flat, he leans down to his navel, where since he was little he likes to clean out the fluff left there by his pullovers.' (The works of Arnaud Desplechin are among the many films and books which have been accused of 'nombrilisme', or navel-gazing.)
This is Besson's first English-language film. I saw this when it first came out, and felt a little uneasy (as this time round) about the relationship between a middle-aged man and a twelve-year-old girl. They seem initially to be opposites: he is a hardened hit-man working for the mafia, whereas she is an innocent whose whole family has been wiped out by bent cops. But it's more complicated than that: Léon (Jean Reno) is in fact very knowledgeable about weapons, but is illiterate and his boss Tony (Danny Aiello) 'looks after' the naive Léon's money; Matilda (Nathalie Portman) doesn't seem much concerned about the death of her parents, but she wants to avenge the death of her four-year-old brother. (Her parents were killed by DEA agents: they'd been paying the parents to hide cocaine found on dealers, but the parents had been keeping some cocaine for themselves and adulterating the rest.)
Very briefly Léon considers killing Mathilda in her sleep, but soon warms to her: she's much more worldly-wise than her years and they come to an arrangement: she lives with Léon, does the shopping, tidies the flat and teaches him to read whereas Léon teaches her how to use a gun and a rifle.
It becomes uncomfortable for Léon when Mathilda falls in love with him because the love he feels for her is purely of an odd kind of paternal nature, and he tells Tony that his own money all goes to a girl called Mathilda if he dies.
Die he does, although he has a weird symbolic re-birth when Mathilda plants his beloved pot plant in the gardens of her new school. This film was more popular with general audiences, partly because American critics thought Besson had known little of what Americans, and particularly New Yorkers, are really like: they thought his ideas just came from American films.
The French Wikipédia calls this a 'film policier', which is by no means untrue although I'd call it more of an action comedy. Certainly it fits into the category of 'le cinéma du look' described by Raphaël Bassan in La Revue du Cinéma (1989), where style triumphs over substance: right at the beginning we have an impossible car chase, with Fred (Christophe Lambert), having stolen papers at a party attended by businessman-cum-gangster Raymond Kerman (Constantin Alexandrov) and his wife Héléna Kerman (Isabelle Adjani), is forced to escape into the bowels of the métro, where he meets another world.
Here we have Le Roller (Jean-Hugues Anglade), who escapes from his thefts in the métro on roller skates and whose stuntman for apparently impossible feats is world champion Thierry Penot; Jean Reno is the indefatigable player of drumsticks; Gros Bill, the muscle man (Christian Gomba) works on his huge body with huge weights and a few times frees Fred from his handcuffs with his sheer strength; and then there's Richard Bohringer, the métro flower seller, etc: all these people live in parts of the métro commuters never see, they are part of a (usually petty) criminal underworld, a fraternal punk society.
Le commissaire Gesberg (Michel Galabru) makes his entrance walking down the métro steps with a skewed ballet troupe of cops following him. He has a major role in this weird world, chasing the underground folk with his men such as Inspecteur Batman (Jean-Pierre Bacri) and Inspecteur Robin (Jean-Claude Lecas): and here of course we have the crux of the matter: cinema as cross-reference. The beginning, for instance, is a nod to The French Connection and the end, with the dying Fred looking at Héléna, an obvious nod to Godard. Definitely, Besson's films look good.
The Chinese dovecote in the middle of the mill pond is Grade II listed and dates from about 1830: it was certainly there in 1852 as it is on the cover of the Strines Journal. It appears that it was erected more for ornamental reasons than practical ones: the earlier days of dovecotes providing food had long gone. It has been repaired a number of times but the essential structure is the same as the first constuction. It has six sides and seventy-two nesting boxes. The weathervane, as well as the points of the compass, has a sailing ship.
Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is one of those very well-known films that I'd failed to see, and although I'm finally pleased that I have seen it I fail to understand what the fuss was all about: this is a low budget movie that was banned in a number of countires but which grossed huge profits, although it's just not scary today! The masks of the guy with the chain saw are so unbelieveable, but maybe that's all part of the fun.
From 1849 to 1905 Wainwright worked at Strines printworks, a calico printing business, where he was accountant and then manager. But he is most noted for his dedication to a monthly paper, the handwritten The Strines Journal, on which he worked with John M. Gregory between 1852 and 1856.
The Strines Journal contained details on many subjects: literary, historical, geographical, scientific, etc. It is a unique record of life as seen in and beyond a Derbyshire village at a certain point in history. Original articles, poems, etc, were requested for inclusion. The journal included a number of illustrations, and from 1853 the photos of Joseph Sidebotham, a partner in the business, were included in the journal. The forty-seven issues were bound into five volumes and remained in the family until 2013, when local historian Rosemary Taylor discovered their whereabouts. They are now in Rylands Library.
Joel Wainwright's other publications include Reminiscences of a life-time in Marple and the neighbourhood, Rural poetry : lecture delivered in S. Anne's Schools, Haughton, November 4th, 1892 and Memories of Marple (1899).
New life, with nascent wings, maybe there's still hope for the future.
'The Bowstones
Two shafts of late Saxon crosses
which were probably landmarks or
boundary stones as well as objects
of devotion, The crossheads with
interlace in the courtyard of Lyme
Hall are likely to be from
the Bowstones'
This is an easy drive from Disley, although when you get on the tarmacked road towards the Bowstones it's really narrow and not really suitable for two vehicles going in opposite directions. But it's still much better than looking for Robin Hood's picking rods, which from Charlesworth is part of the way along a very narrow winding road, and then you have to walk about twenty minutes to find them. Here it's very different: the Bowstones are next to the road, taking photos is no problem – as long as you avoid the rusty barbed wire – and the only people we met on the road were hikers. In fact this is hiking territory if you like that, but we don't. It's a question of taste. This feature, as with the picking rods, is also known as 'Robin Hood's Bowstones', but coming from Nottingham I've had enough of the legends. These are very interesting stones. Is all, although the rusty wire does it no justice.
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