Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Angst essen Seele auf* | Fear Eats the Soul (1974)

This is a film of love and loneliness – and also racism and ageism in post-war Germany – and is a inspired by Douglas Sirk's films (and All That Heaven Allows in particular). One evening Emmi Kurowski (Brigitte Mira), an elderly widowed cleaning woman, shelters from the rain in an café unknown to her: the blank stares are mainly due to the fact that she is in a bar frequented by north Africans. Ali (El Hedi ben Salem) is more than twenty years younger than her asks her to dance to a jukebox record. They do so and leave together, Ali walking her to her flat. As it's raining she invites him in for a coffee and a few brandies, and as she desperately wants her loneliness to be held off she asks him to stay, which he does. But in the spare bedroom he can't sleep, knocks at her door and she is stunned but delighted to have found a lover.

The slander mill begins and the racism of the neighbours comes to the fore. Immigrants, of course, are dirty, only want money and sex, and are idle. While Ali works in the car factory Emmi goes to her daughter Barbara (Barbara Valentin) to announce that she's in love, and her son-in-law Eugen (Fassbinder himself) is pretending to be on sick leave, although he's evidently perfectly well in his vest, swilling beer, ordering his wife around and spouting hypocritical clichés about the worthlessness of immigrants. Emmi is undeterred.

It's significant that, when the lovers (for they are lovers) get together again that night, Emmi cooks him a meal and Ali insists on giving Emmi money for the hospitality he's received. That same night the landlord's son visits and tells Emmi that she's breaking her lease by subletting the property, although Emmi responds that she's marrying Ali: landlord's son and scandal mill silenced.

The unusual couple do indeed marry and Emmi later introduces him to her dumbstruck family, one of her sons reactions being to kick in her television set. He later sends a cheque to replaces the set, Ali even shakes his hand when her son apologises, but the damage is done, and anyway they've already had to go through the trauma of her racist local shop owner in effect refusing to serve her husband who he says can't even speak German.

Emmi herself falls into a racist trap by having her work colleagues meet him and feel his muscles, treating him as some kind of circus exhibit, and she doesn't want to cook him his beloved couscous. Inevitably he falls into the hands of younger women, his workmates mock her by calling her his grandmother, and in the bar he begins to burn their savings away.

As on the first day, Emmi enters the café and asks the server to put the same song on. Ali immediately gets up from the card game, asks her to dance with him, and although she says she can understand him sleeping with younger women, that she sees how old she is every time she looks into the mirror, he tells her she's his one love. He has a fit and has to be rushed to hospital, the doctor says its a perforated stomach ulcer very common in immigrants due to stress, and that he's sure to be back in hospital in six months time. Emmi says, with determination, that he won't.

*The literal meaning of this is 'Fear Eat Soul Up', and the English title is taken from an Arabic expression, the unorthodox German being the way Ali speaks 'pidgeon German', and this style of his talking is reproduced in the sub-titles.

Luis Buñuel’s Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie | The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)

This being a film directed by Buñuel, there is criticism of governmental corruption, of the bourgeoisie, of religion, the military, the police, and by extension of all institutions. Buñuel's main weapons are surrealism and/or absurdity.

At the beginning there are six people at a dinner which is an evening too early: Rafael Acosta (Fernando Rey, ambassador of the (fictitious) South American Republic of Miranda), François Thévenot (Paul Frankeur), his wife Simone (Delphine Seyrig) and her sister Florence (Bulle Ogier) arrive unexpectedly at the home of Henri Sénéchal (Jean-Pierre Castel) and his wife Alice (Stéphane Audran). This is to be the first of several interrupted or non-existent eating or drinking failures, such as when François drives the others to a simple auberge he knows, although the door is at first locked but when they are seated and about to make orders they discover that there is a dead patron a few yards away. They leave hastily.

Raphael sells François and Henri a large quantity of cocaine (proved to be excellent by the fictional Harrison-Srauder test), and during the transaction Raphael looks out of the window, sees a young woman outside the Embassy of Miranda selling toys, and shoots a clockwork dog, explaining to the mystified François that she's a terrorist fighting against his government.

When the dinner is to take place again, Henri and Alice beforehand climb out of their bedroom window to have sex in the garden, causing Raphael and François to suspect that there's gong to be a raid by the drug squad, so they depart. When Henri and Alice return to the house they're surprised to find their guests have gone, although a bishop dressed as a gardener turns up and – after a slight misunderstanding – is employed as a gardener.

There's really no need to ask for explanations here, particularly as some of the later events – such as the murder of a colonel by Raphael, the assassination of all the main characters, the appearance of ghosts, etc – can usually be explained by bad dreams, even by dreams within dreams. This is, after all, a film by Buñuel. Cue for the six principal characters – as they've done several times before in the movie – to inexplicably walk down a country road together, although this final time they're not walking away from the water tower but towards it.

Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau’s Haut Perchés | Don't Look Down (2019)

This is another huis clos, this time with five people high up in Paris within view of the Tour Eiffel, one young woman and four guys: Veronica (Manika Auxire), Marius (Geoffrey Couët), Louis (François Nambot), Lawrence (Lawrence Valin) and Nathan (Simon Frenay). All five are victims of an unnamed, never seen man, a monster who has abused their love, and it is the turn of each one to conclude their relationship by seeing him individually, although the pact is that none of them will reveal what happened in any of the one-to-one occasions.

Each has his or her separate pain and no one has 'known' the same man, although there is one particularly surreal occasion when Nathan sticks his chest out and starts strutting like a chicken, others recognise this as a common experience, and start bumping each others' thrust out chests. Most seem to agree with the well-known nursery rhyme 'Il était un petit navire' which Veronica begins and others join in, which speaks of a person drawing a short straw on a ship to find out who will be eaten:

'On tira à la courte paille, 

On tira à la courte paille,

Pour savoir qui-qui-qui serait mangé,

Pour savoir qui-qui-qui serait mangé,

Ohé ! Ohé !'

Their pain is common, but their individual experiences are different, such as Veronica saying the tyrant used to shop with her, she would buy things he said he liked, he acted as if they were a couple, although they wouldn't eat together. But they eat his food in the highrise flat, and it's obvious that Veronica and Marius take a delight in slicing a sausage, clearly imagining that they're slicing  the monster's penis.

Marius is very proud, these are obviously cultured victims, and he initially objects to mistakenly being call 'Mario', at which he snorts and says he's not a plumber. At the beginning he puts on some music and dances frantically to himself, then relaxing as if relieved of a burden.

Nathan breaks down crying in another room, tears run down Louis's face at the memory of the abuse to which he's been put, but when it's Marius's turn to go to the man they retreat from his loud laughter (which he later denies) and shut themselves out on the veranda, looking at the view.

Lawrence proves to be a genius at trigonometry when he cuts an apple tart they've cooked into exactly five equal sections, and – their separate exorcisms over – they contemplate the view and vaguely locate where they shall go back home. This is a film where the action is mainly internal and we're left imagining: not one for those who like meanings served up on a plate.

Jacques Rivette’s Paris nous appartient | Paris Belongs to Us (1961)

Paris nous appartient is Rivette's first feature and is something of a strange curiosity, being shot through by suicide or references to it, paranoia and general fear that doesn't seem to have a cause. This is set in 1957, when McCarthyism was at its height. Philip Kaufman (Daniel Crohem) has escaped from paranoid, witch-hunting America and fears that Gérard (Giani Esposito) will now be killed as the Spanish refugee Juan, who died before the film, is thought by some to have been killed, by others that he killed himself. Everything is unstable, although there is nothing to prove the validity of the characters' fears, which may well be only in their heads.

Anne Goupil (Betty Schneider), the sister of Pierre (François Maistre), is the main character in this unfathomable film, and is a student of Shakespeare. She at first meets a young Spanish woman in a room across from her, who speaks of the strange death of her brother, although she mysteriously disappears. Pierre takes her to a party where Philip is drunk and angry with Terry (Françoise Prévost), calling her responsible for Juan's death.

The next day Anne goes to a rehearsal of Shakespeare's Pericles, and Gérard (who was at the party) is the producer. She makes a kind of audition, although later (when there's serious interest in the play) she's dropped. But she's not bothered because she's more interested in what Philip has to say about Gérard being in danger.

Gérard kills himself in the end, although Anne doesn't know why. The film lasts for 140 minutes, which some think is far too long. I'm not too sure because, even though this is opaque stuff, it's quite fascinating, and in a sense sums up a particular time.

Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012)

Amour received the Palme d'or at the Festival de Cannes, and was also only the second feature film (after Truffaut's Le Dernier Métro in 1980) to win the five most important Césars: best film, best director, best male actor (Jean-Louis Trintignant), best female actor (Emmanuelle Riva) and best screenplay (Haneke).

This is a superb film in which Georges and Anne are octogenarians and both retired classical music teachers. Their daughter Eva (Isabelle Huppert) is also a musician and is very concerned for both her parents: Anne gradually becoming bound to a wheelchair, then bedridden but refusing to go into a home, the situation becomes increasingly worse for the relatively healthy Georges.

This could be a play in that the film is a huis clos involving essentially two people in one flat. As Anne's health becomes increasingly worse and she can't speak, Georges eventually has to resort to euthanasia. Amour? À mort. A wonderful, but so painful, unsentimental love story.

John Frankenheimer’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996)

I only found out about this film from the French newspaper Libération, which this week published an article on the South Africa-born film director Richard Stanley, who now lives in tiny Montségur in the Pyrénées, and is currently experiencing a welcome return. Good criticism wasn't always there though. Stanley – who made a promising start with Hardware (1990) and Dust Devil (1992) – fell from cinematic grace with a resounding bang with The Island of Dr. Moreau.

Stanley had been fascinated by H. G. Wells's novel of (almost) the same name for years, and was eager to make (another) filmed version of it. But big name actors' egos got in the way, as did the weather and Stanley's personality, etc, and in a few days Frankenheimer took over the film version from Stanley. In 2014 David Gregory released a film about the film: Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau.

So, we have Frankenheimer's film, which lasts a full ninety-six minutes, and has a very low score with both critics and viewers: is this deserved? Unfortunately, yes. UN official Edward Douglas (David Thewlis) is rescued on a dinghy after a plane crash by Montgomery (Val Kilmer), who is a neurosurgeon gone mad and now a kind of vet, but that's not really the issue: Montgomery takes Douglas to an island ruled by Dr Moreau (Marlon Brando), who has been thrown out of the USA for his experiments on animals.

On the island are a number of semi-human creatures and also Moreau's daughter Aissa (Fairuza Balk), and Douglas later learns that Moreau has been implanting human genes in animals to create his ideal being: someone with humanity, but none of the human imperfections. About halfway through though, Moreau is savagely killed by his own creations, and then we hit chaos: lashings of blood, terror, cannabalism (is that the right word?), and an all-round mess. I can understand why some would find the whole thing amusing, but not for me.

Jacques Rivette's Le Coup de berger | Fool's Mate (1956)

Jacque Rivette's Le Coup de berger is generally considered to be if not the, then certainly one of the first, manifestations of the Nouvelle Vague: this twenty-eight minute short even has cameos of Truffaut, Chabrol and Godard in the dinner party at the end. And Truffaut showed a brief clip of it in his own short Les Mistons (1957), known as The Brats in English.

The expression 'le coup de berger' alludes to final chess moves, and several remarks are made about chess in the voiceover: Claire (Virginie Vitry) moves her 'fou' (the bishop), the position of the board is turned round when her husband Jean (Jacques Doniol-Valcroze) plays a very unexpected move, and the coup de grâce comes at the end when Claire is fooled by her own sister Solange (Anne Doat)

What am I talking about? Well, Claire is in an adulterous relationship with Claude (Jean-Claude Brialy), who gives her an expensive fur coat which she can't wear without seriously arousing her husband's suspicions. So she hatches a plan to pretend she's taken the taxi home, discovered a left luggage ticket on the car floor, and she'll then ask her husband to collect the surprise find. She has quite a job getting him to agree to this, but tells him it might be a valuable find.

But when Jean comes home the next day with the suitcase Claude has left at the left luggage office all that's in it is the skin of a rabbit. Claire is in a no-win situation, and doesn't know what to think. However, when Claire and Jean hold a party at their home  Solange turns up wearing the coat: yes, Jean's having an affair with her.

My reaction to this is that the film doesn't quite work because Claire could easily have collected the coat herself because of her husband's obvious initial lack of interest in taking the ticket. All the same, this is a fascinating early curiosity by Rivette, which was also written and produced by Chabrol.

Éric Rohmer's L'Amour l'après-midi | Love in the Afternoon (1972)

 

And so we come to the sixth and final film in the Six contes moraux series, after La Boulangère de Monceau and La Carrière de Suzanne, (both 1963); La Collectionneuse (1967); Ma nuit chez Maud (1969); and Le Genou de Claire (1970). Once again, this is a film of temptation in which the (male) partner returns to his former (chosen) partner.

Frédéric (Bernard Verley) is a businessman happily married to Hélène (Françoise Verley), who has given them one child and is pregnant for a second time. But Frédéric fantasies, dreaming that he has a magic amulet that entices any woman he approaches: cue for former actors in Rohmer's films to tantalisingly appear. His only failure is when his magic jewel was turned towards him.

And then the pushy, sexy, Chloé, ex-girlfriend of an ex-friend turns up, disrupting his life, causing gossip among his staff, and leaving gifts to his young son. How couldn't he not respond favourably, meet her in the afternoons when he's free, have wild sex with her? Um... No.

When Hélène has a second child Chloé wants a child by Frédéric, and when he visits her for a last time she's just coming out of the shower. He dries her, she waits naked on the bed, he begins to take his pullover off and realises he looks exactly like he was when playing ghost games with his son, so quietly leaves to return to his loving wife. No moral, just what Frédéric thinks.

Éric Rohmer's Le Genou de Claire | Claire's Knee (1970)

 

The idea of this film, the fifth in the series of Rohmer's Contes Moraux, seems more than a little ridiculous: a thirty-five year-old (who surely should know better) falls in love with an eighteen-year-old girl's knee, and is fulfilled when he eventually manages it. Of course, there's a lot more to the film than that, although not too much. But amazingly it works and this is one of Rohmer's better earlier films: in fact it's quite fascinating.

Cultural attaché Jérôme (Jean-Claude Brialy) bumps into an old friend Aurora (Aurora Cornu) in Talloires, Lac d'Annecy. She's a writer of romantic novels, and has been inspired by Jérôme's exploits to write previous ones. Through Aurora he meets Mme Walter (Michèle Montel) and first her fifteen-year-old daughter Laura (Béatrice Romand), who obviously soon falls in love with Jérôme: the fact that he's due to be married in a week's time seems to be more of an issue than the fact that Laura is a mere schoolgirl, but then this is France in the seventies, when paedophilic ideas were, er, shall we say fashionable?

Anyway, Jérôme's outings with Laura are chaste, and although he becomes infatuated by Laura's half-sister Claire, his activities there too remain chaste: there's some displacement, though, and he isn't interested in her unseen vagina but her permanently visible knee. Aurora's clearly making mental notes for a future novel as Jérôme tells her his secrets, but his opportunity fortuitously comes when he motors Claire across the lake and they shelter in a downpour: then, he tells her that her boyfriend Gilles (Gérard Falconetti) is not a fit person to be with as he's cheating on her. Claire breaks down crying, and the only way he can console her, well, is just to get off on rubbing her knee for a time. As some might say: whatever floats your boat.

The miracle-maker Éric Rohmer has created a truly compelling movie out of nothing: brilliant!

Éric Rohmer's Ma nuit chez Maud | My Night at Maud's (1969)

 

This is Rohmer's openly Pascalian film, in which the mathematician Blaise Pascal (1622-62) is mentioned several times. Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is an engineer who has recently worked in Canada and South America and now is based in Clermont-Ferrand working for Michelin: many years before, Pascal was born in what was then just known of Clermont.

Jean-Louis goes to a bookshop and buys Pascal's Pensées. He is Catholic, handsome and unmarried: he has had a number of relationships which have led to nothing concrete, and then in Clermont cathedral he sees a young woman he will later know as Françoise (Marie-Christine Barrault), a blonde, with whom he becomes infatuated, to the point of trying to follow her 'mob' until he loses her. This is Christmas and people are celebrating, he goes into a café-restaurant and bumps into Vidal (Antoine Vitez), whom he has not seen for a number of years.

Previously, there was talk at Jean-Louis's workplace of a man who has narrowly avoided death on the local icy roads. This recalls the mishap Pascal had had in 1654 on the Pont de Neuilly, when he had a near-death experience while in his carriage. Vidal is a university lecturer of philosophy and they talk of Pascal's bet, although as a Marxist Vidal sees the bet in historical as opposed to religious terms.

Led to the flat of the separated doctor Maud (Françoise Fabian), the three have a meal and speak of Pascal, although Vidal has too much to drink and leaves. The snow outside prevents Jean-Louis – who speaks of the blonde girl he's seen as if she were a positive entity in his life – from leaving, and although he sleeps at the side of Maud, and although Maud entices him several times, he makes no attempts to have sex with her.

By chance Jean-Louis meets the Catholic moped girl again, entreats her to meet him, gets stuck in the snow taking her home, sleeps in her spare room, walks with her on the heights of Clermont, although she resists his advances.

Flash forward five years and at a beach people again chance upon one another, but Jean-Louis, Françoise and their young son meeting Maud is a very unusual coincidence, especially as Françoise knows Maud because she's had a relationship with her husband. Such are the games Rohmer loves to play.

Éric Rohmer's La Collectionneuse | The Collector (1967)

 

So, Rohmer's first 32mm feature film (made for almost nothing), and the third of the Comédies et proverbes series. Essentially it's – like most of the others in this series – about sexual temptation swerved and the man (it's always a man) going back to his first choice. Adrien (Patrick Bauchau) is leaving for St Tropez to do a little business with an American collector of rare vases – but really far more to laze around in his rich friend Rodolphe's hired villa by the sea* with Daniel (Daniel Pommereulle) while his fiancée goes to London.

Unfortunately, the house is also occupied by the tempting young Haydée, who is the real collector, a collector of men, who goes off with a different guy at night until the two men put a stop to it. Both men are obsessed by Haydée, and Daniel sleeps with her but soon leaves. Adrien's buyer Sam (Seymour Hertzberg) flirts with Haydée, and Haydée smashes the valuable vase, although Adrien already has the money and he leaves with Haydée.

On the way back to the villa Haydée meets two men see knows, goes over to their car, and meanwhile Adrien is blocking the road, atlhough he doesn't pull over but just keeps on driving to the villa on his own, makes a call for the first flight to London and there we have it: temptation avoided, but anyway how long would the relationship have lasted?

*Rohmer has somehing of a preocupation with bech relationships.

Éric Rohmer's La Carrière de Suzanne | Suzanne's Career (1963)

 

Rohmer's Six Contes Moraux are somewhat mistranslated as Six Moral Tales because he was in fact talking not about 'moral' in the English sense but about what people feel and think, their analyses of situations or their own feelings. He makes this clear in his interview with Graham Petrie in Film Quarterly (vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 38-9, 1971). It's also interesting that at the time Rohmer never intended to release the first two 16mm films (La Boulangère de Monceau and La Carrière de Suzanne), at the time considering them 'very amateur'.

La Carrière de Suzanne concerns the relationship of pharmacy student Bertrand (Philippe Beuzen) with his Science-Po student friend and womaniser Guillaume (Christian Charrière) and Suzanne (Catherine Sée). Guillaume, who initially chatted up Suzanne, uses her mainly financially until she no longer has any money, which embarrasses Bertrand, although for some reason he looks up to Guillaume so makes no direct objections.

Bertrand has a liking for Sophie (Diane Wilkinson), who is really out of his league. But in the end – one of those surprise endings of which Rohmer was so fond – Suzanne marries the handsome Franck (Patrick Bauchau). Amateurish might well be an apt description, but (like La Boulangère de Monceau before) this film contains the germ of Rohmer's later movies.

Éric Rohmer's La Boulangère de Monceau | The Girl at the Monceau Bakery (1963)

 

This film is the first of Rohmer's Six contes moraux, of which the rest in the series are: La Carrière de Suzanne (1963), La Collectionneuse (1967), Ma nuit chez Maud (1969), Le Genou de Claire (1970), and L'Amour l'après-midi (1972). The future director Barbet Schroeder first appeared in this film as the student, Jaqueline (Claudine Soubrier) is the baker's assistant, Sylvie (Michèle Girardon) is the original desired woman, and Bertrand Tavernier is the narrator.

Filmed around the area of Le Parc Monceau (of which La Rotonde (now public toilets) is seen here), the law student uses the local cafés and is talking to his friend Schmidt (Fred Junk) when he sees a young woman with whom he'll become obsessed: Sylvie. He literally bumps into her one day, although he daren't say more than a few words. He spends a great deal of time wandering around the area, particularly rue de Lévis, but doesn't find her again.

His diet as a student is mainly bread products, and he shops at the baker's in rue Lebouteux for sablés, gâteaux Lorrains, etc. He vicariously builds up a slow relationship with the young assistant Jacqueline, and eventually asks her to go out with him, to which she eventually agrees. However, on the day of the date he again bumps into Sylvie, who twisted her ankle the day after he met her. For some time she has been watching the student out of her window opposite the baker's. The student loses interest in the assistant and they're married six months later.

On French Wikipédia, regarding this film, an apparent quotation from Rohmer is given: 'Tandis que le narrateur est à la recherche d'une femme, il en rencontre une autre qui accapare son attention jusqu'au moment où il retrouve la première' ('While the narrator is looking for one woman, he finds another who monopolises his attention until he finds the first woman again'). This sentence could sum up most films in this series.

Céline Sciamma's Bande de filles | Girlhood (2014)

 

Yes, this is yet another coming of age film, although the huge difference is that it's a French coming of age film which has an almost entirely black – particularly female – cast: plus, it's one of the best recent films I've seen in the last twelve months, brilliantly acted and highly engrossing.

Marieme (Karidja Touré) lives in the Parisian suburbs with her mother who works nights, her two younger sisters and her domineering brother Djibril (Cyril Mendy). She quits school after an impasse with her CPE (for which, read educational advisor) and then timidly joins a gang of three girls: Lady (real name Sophie: Assa Sylla), Adiatou (Lindsay Karamoh) and Fily (Mariétou Touré). They ride into central Paris and walk around fashion shops in Les Halles, carefully watched particularly by one sales assistant who suspects them of theft.

Marieme's dress and behaviour change as she becomes part of the gang: she changes her braids to long smooth hair, like her friends she extorts money from school students, and they spend the night in a hotel drinking, smoking drugs, trying on clothing they've stolen, dancing and (in a superb scene which will probably remain a classic in modern cinema) dance stoned to Rihanna's 'Diamonds': the world belongs to them. Marieme, after a presentation necklace by Lady labelled 'Vic' (for victory), becomes fully initiated into the gang.

Marieme likes Ismaël (Idrissa Diabaté), although as he's a friend of her brother's there's always been an understanding that this is a no-go area. But one night she seeks Ismaël out at his home and is the active party in an exercise in seduction. Her violently angry brother finds out and calls her a 'pute', she takes refuge in a fast food restaurant and the aptly, but rather clumsily, named Abou (Djibril Gueye) asks her to work for him: he's a pimp but also a drug dealer, and it's under his employ (as 'Vic') that she'll work as a supplier.

Until, that is, Abou, er, abuses his power and tries to kiss her. Marieme runs away into the arms of Ismaël, who is in love with her, wants to marry her and have kids, blah, blah. But that's not what Marieme, although touched, wants. She starts to ring the door of her family's flat to go home, then revises the decision with tears: she's just realised that you can't go home again. Marvellous, so unHollywood.

Ritesh Batra's The Lunchbox (2013)

 

Anyone unaware of the Mumbai dabbawalas soon becomes enlightened in this film of India, where much is made of the dabbawalas picking up lunches from restaurants and homes to be delivered to (usually husbands) at work. This is how widower Saajan (Irrfan Khan), who's shortly due for retirement, comes into epistolary contact with the much younger Ila (Nimrat Kaur). Ila is trying to spice up her married life by cooking wonderful meals for her husband, although the (apparently virtually impossible) happens and Saajan receives (with huge pleasure) the lunch prepared by Ila. Soon Ila and Saajan are sending notes to each other via the lunchbox, and the notes become increasingly friendly.

Ila's husband is having an affair and she tells Saajan that she's thinking of moving to Bhutan where the cost living is about 80% less than Mumbai, and Saajan bravely suggests that he move there too. In her reply, Ila suggests that they meet in a local restaurant. Unfortunately Saajan goes there but only looks at her from a distance, finding her beautiful but considering that he is far too old for her. In the end, there is no definite end.

Věra Chytilová's Sedmikrásky | Daisies (1966)

 

Věra Chytilová's Daisies (starring the young women Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová, who are both known as Marie here) may call to mind many other off-centre films, such as La Grand Bouffe and Céline et Julie vont en bateau, but that still doesn't give an idea of the craziness in this movie. It has been called neo-dadaist, a satire on bourgeois decadence, and was banned in Czechoslovakia as if was considered anti-communist.

The young women criticise things because they're bad, and proceed to perform many destructive and generally negative actions to, it seeems, alleviate their boredom: they they tease elderly men into buying them meals; they burn toilet paper hanging in their room; they have a box in a nightclub, get drunk and drink from other people's glasses; they cut food up and display it on a plate as if it's a temporary work of art, etc.

Towards the end is an extended scene in which they go to a factory of some sort and ride in a dumb waiter to a large room where a banquet has been prepared. At first they tentatively eat bits of the food at the edges, then carry it to the main table, gorge themselves and dance on the remains. In a following sequence they attempt to lay the table as it was, clearing it of food and putting bits of broken plates together, a napkin on the top, and piling the huge mess of food in a heap.

The film closes as it begins, with a shot of war, and the final message is: 'dedicated to those who get upset only over a stomped-upon bed of lettuce'.

Desiree Akhavan's Appropriate Behaviour (2015)

 

Appropriate Behaviour is Desiree Akhavan's dazzling first feature, in which Akhavan herself stars as a young bisexual Iranian-American Shirin trying to rebuild her life again in Brooklyn  after breaking up with with  Maxine (Rebecca Henderson).  She's also now homeless and jobless, although she has wealthy parents and finds no problem with accommodation and soon gets a job teaching very young kids in Slope Park how to make a movie.

The difficulties Shirin has are not only in establishing to herself who she is, but also to her parents who she is sexually, and after a very weak confession to her mother she's in denial. The poster above might indicate drug problems, but she's just in the toilet of a bar, surrounded by comments such as 'Brian is a stupid dick', 'Fuck you', 'Suck it', 'Kiss me', etc. She's just sitting on the toilet cover pissed off, but not pissed or anything worse.

Sasie Sealy's Lucky Grandma (2019)

 

This prime slice of (brilliantly acted) hokum is highly unusual in that the main character Grandma (Tsai Chin) was almost 85 at the time it was made, and she is in almost every scene: in fact, the film wouldn't exist without her. 

Grandma smokes her way through most of the movie, and lives a very dangerous life. Her husband having left her with almost nothing, she draws out that almost nothing and takes a bus to an Atlantic City casino because her fortune teller has told her that 28 October will be her lucky day. 

It is and it isn't, as she loses all her money, but on the way back the stranger sitting next to her dies, his bag falls into her hands, she keeps it, and finds that the bag contains a fortune. Trouble is, this gets her involved with the Chinese mafia, she has to employ a bodyguard, go through a great deal of potentially life-threatening episodes, but well, she has to come out intact, even if it means moving in with her son and his wife in the end.

Carol Morley's The Madness of the Dance (2006)

 

Carol Morley's The Madness of the Dance is a history of mass hysteria from the Middle Ages through to today, and includes nuns miaowing and biting like cats; dancing mania in Germany; people dancing to cure themselves of tarantula bites; students in Louisiana with a twitching leg supposedly infected by the water; an outbreak of contagious laughter in Tanzania; fainting fits in Blackburn, Lancashire; in China, mania caused by people believing that their genitalia were disappearing; in Belgium, people experienced nausea on consuming a fizzy drink. This is told by Maxine Peake acting as a professor, but the message is that madness is contagious and can be experienced by perfectly, er, 'normal' people.

Carol Morley's The Fear of Trilogy (2006)

 

The Fear of Trilogy is (perhaps) a deliberately pretentious title for a film, particularly as it's only three minutes long. It inevitably comes across as mock-documentary, especially as the po-faced Maxine Peake tells us what she knows of the dangers of birds (Hitchcock had to get in there), things that can fall on your head (best to wear a crash helmet), and sleep-walking into a bar, or even into a cock.

Carol Morley's Stalin My Neighbour (2004)

 

Carol Morley's Stalin My Neighbour is, perhaps needless to say, about trauma, although this is fictional. Annie (Alicya Eyo) is obviously traumatised: whatever the interviewer asks her in this east London environment, Annie (suffering from a kind of dissociation illness) is only prepared to talk about the general local history of the area, about Ghandi, Stalin and (significantly) the anti-psychiatrist R. D. Laing: anything but the death of her younger sister, for which she feels guilty. Death, trauma, disappearance, all haunt Carol Morley's films.

Carol Morley's Return Trip (2001)

 

This twenty-four minute short is a reconstruction of a trip to India which the teenage Carol Morley made with her friend Catherine Corcoran (or 'Corky').  There are a great number of impressionistic shots here – including a very irritating sequence when the ping-pong background 'music' almost drowns the comment – although the film soon settles into the real subject of the film: trauma. During the original visit Corky had fallen into a well-like structure, had to receive hospital treatment, and in fact almost died.  Both mothers comment on the event, and Corky reveals that she still hasn't completely recovered after all the years, but Morley is obviously trying to put an old ghost to sleep.

Carol Morley's Everyday Something (2001)

 

From Carol Morley's collection of newspaper cuttings of unusual events comes this film reconstructing often obsessive forms of behaviour: a man makes hooting sounds and thinks an owl is returning calls, although it's just his neighbour playing games; a man is hit by a double-decker bus while stepping into the road eating a pastie; a man 'saved' from drowning is annoyed because he was attempting suicide; a shopper is punched and kicked in a supermarket; a woman stabs her husband six times (but not fatally) because he obsessively made her take exercises because she was overweight; a man is granted a divorce after 38 years of living with his wife who can't stop herself moving furniture around the house; after four unsuccessful attempts at repairing her washing machine, a woman holds the fifth man prisoner for three hours; a man obsessed with the model Claudia Schiffer forces his parents to answer questions about her and hits them if they give the wrong answers; a woman hides her mother in the kitchen for three years after she died of natural causes.

A very strange fifteen-minute short.

Carol Morley's The Week Elvis Died (1997)

 

Elvis Presley died the year this film was released, although this film is nothing to do with him: even the opening song 'Are You Lonesome Tonight?', well-known as a Presley one, is sung by Russell Churney. No, The Week Elvis Died really refers not to the singer, but to the name of the beloved pet rabbit of Karen (Jennifer Williams).

Karen lives in a working-class world where the Elvis-figure father seems to be missing, where the rest of her family seem not to understand her, and of course they don't realise that she is being bullied by three awful girls who are obviously jealous of her academic achievements, particularly that she has been chosen to represent the school in the musical group and is to have the privilege of speaking to Tony Blackburn, DJ.

But Elvis dies, and it appears that her school enemies are responsible. On the night of the radio programme, the great occasion when she meets her DJ hero, she answers that her favourite book is the Wombles, but when Blackburn asks her if she has any friends she freezes, and continues to freeze through the following questions, which include if she has a pet: in the end she grabs the mike and lets out a huge scream of horror, all across the airwaves.

Carol Morley's I'm Not Here (1984)

The title of this short from Carol Morley comes from a shameful ranting letter by Alex Guinness which was published in The Times in January 1970, in which he complained about the lack of attention shop assistants paid to customers: it's 'I'm Not Here' that was chosen as the title. Morley collects news items, and the initial mention in this of Linda Sheridan ('Miss London Stores 1970) was found in the nineties in a scrapbook found in a skip in Finsbury Park.

Edith here mentions the film 'Full Metal Jacket' as a criticism of the fascist behaviour of the management, although I particulary note the obvious influence of Jean-Luc Godard's Tout va bien, with its long tracking shot of supermarket counters, as a tribute to the great director. This is so glaringly a political film, no matter what the original intention.

Carol Morley's Secondhand Daylight (1983)

 

Secondhand Daylight is Carol Morley's second graduation film, and is set in a fastfood restaurant. Against a backdrop of the restaurant's wares, young people (normally in the bottom right corner of the screen) talk about their problems, mainly their problems in (or out of) relationships. We are only party to some of what is said by the interviewees, it is clear that there is some confusion in their minds, although nothing specific is mentioned: as so frequently with Morley's films, something is missing.

Carol Morley's Girl (1983)

 

Girl is one of two of Carol Morley's graduation shorts, and is about loss. Through suicide. Suicide is devastating because it's not a natural occurrence through illness or age, but something very often inexplicable, even if there's a death note: narrators are very often unreliable even in reality. If suicide itself is caused by truama, it in itself causes trauma to those living, and this trauma can last for the rest of the lives of the people concerned. My first cousin Charles Pembleton killed himself in 1990 at about the age of forty, by carbon monoxide poisoning. I was told that he left no death note, just a brief collection of self-published poems under the title Living in a Timewarp from sixteen years before. I occasionally read a few of these poems, and although the meaning in these often opaque abstractions eludes the reader, the obvious existential anguish is written large, and the suggestion of suicide as an end can't be written off.

Suicide haunts the Manchester Morley family, and did so long before the journalist Paul Morley wrote a book about his father who killed himself by carbon monoxide poisoning: Nothing (2000). The first short of two of Paul's younger sister Carol's graduation films was released as Girl in 1993, lasts just seven minutes and reconstructs the relationship she had with her father, the initial mystery of his death to her, and attempts to relive the time in memory.

This reconstruction is done in shots of her father taking her to school, shots of the staircase, and the bizarre background sound of a sketch from television's 'The Morecombe and Wise Show', involving the 'singing' of 'Boom Oo Yata-Ta-Ta' to 'Are You Lonesome Tonight?': this partly serves as a background to part of the film, and the viewer understands the memory of the young girl too. Interestingly, the shots often reveal only a partial shot of the whole object, as if to underline that this is only a partial memory, and memory can only ever be partial. Significantly, 'Are you Lonesome Tognight' – a song of yearning and loss – is the opening song to another short by Morley: 'The Week Elvis Died'.

A good start.

Éric Rohmer Les Nuits de la pleine lune | Full Moon in Paris (1984)

 

Les Nuits de la plein lune is Éric Rohmer's fourth episode in his Comédies et Proverbes series, and is set in the new development of Lognes and central Paris. The 'proverb' 'Qui a deux femmes perd son âme, qui a deux maisons perd sa raison' ('The person who has two women loses his soul, the person who has two houses loses his reason') was is fact invented by Rohmer himself.

This being a Rohmer film, it's about love, although of course seen from a different angle. In a nutshell, the designer (of lamps, as in moonlight) Louise (Pascale Ogier) is living in the Parisian suburbs with the possessive and older Rémi (Tchéky Karyo), who isn't interested in partying as Louise is. He's annoyed when she returns for some of the week to her flat in central Paris because she wants some space, to be on her own. She tells him that she loves him deeply and that their relationship will in fact benefit from the new arrangement. In reality though she spends a lot of time with Octave (Fabrice Luchini) with whom she has a platonic relationship. But at a party she meets Bastien (Christian Vadim), to whom she's sexually attracted and with whom she sleeps on one occasion, slipping from his flat in the early hours to return to Rémi. But Rémi isn't there, he's on his way back from a friend of a friend of  Louise's, who's the love of his life. Louise returns to her Paris flat in tears.

Jealousy plays a large part in this film: Rémi's jealousy of men Louise sees, jealousy too perhaps of her youth and vitality; Octave's jealousy of Bastien; Louise's jealousy of Rémi, who she thinks is having an affair with her friend Camille (Virginie Thévenet); etc.

This is a film of the clash of egos, and no one's ego is as monstrous as Octave's. Octave is married but lusts after Louise, who only wants to be his friend. He is a writer, and can interrupt a conversation just because of something he's said that he thinks is of sparkling intellect and that he has to jot down in his note book. He's also a liar, trying to stir things up between Louise and Rémi: when Louise says she's seen Rémi in a café, Octave says he's seen Camille too, planting seeds of doubt in Louise's mind about Rémi's fidelity. And what of Louise herself, who wants to be in a relationship but to be free at the same time: what kind of ego is that? Both Octave and Louise want to have their cake and eat it.

This is the self-deception: Octave, in spite of being told several times that Louise doesn't want the kind of relationship he wants, insists on pawing her, at one stage taking things a little too far and threatening the friendship. Louise is really deceiving herself if she thinks that Rémi is going to fall for her every whim. And for someone who wants to be alone some of the time, the only time she seems to spend in her flat is when she's on the phone trying to go out with someone.

Like an entomologist of the mind, Rohmer examines all aspects of love, its transience, its automatic assumptions, the borders between sexual desire and love itself, the questions, the torment, and so on.

Destiny Ekaragha’s Gone Too Far! (2013)

 

This is Destiny Ekaragha's first feature, only the third feature made by a black woman, and is set as her impressive Tight Jeans short was in Peckham, London. Adapted by the director from Bola Egbaje's eponymous play (2007), Gone Too Far! toys with the petty rivalry between various non-whites in the community, but displays it in an essentially humorous way.

Yemi (Malachi Kirby) meets his older brother Iku (OC Uyeke), whom he's not seen for many years and doesn't even recognise. What's worse, Iku dresses in an uncool way, such as wearing socks with sandals, and speaking a mixture of English and Yoruba. Obviously, Yami is embarrassed, all the more so as he's sent by his mother to go with Iku to buy okra.

On the way they meet many characters, including the half-Jamaican girl Armani (Shanika Warren-Markland) Yami has the hots for, but who isn't interested in Yami and makes a fool of  him: she's a prick teaser. In fact she's the girlfriend of Razer (Tosin Cole), who likes to think he's the main man of the neighbourhood: cue for fights, misunderstandings, etc.

I winced a few times – when the comedy tilted towards farce, and when the acting let things down a bit – but this is a hugely promising debut feature, probably introducing issues which British cinema hasn't touched on before.

Destiny Ekaragha’s Tight Jeans (2008)

Destiny Ekaragha’s first short feature Tight Jeans, set in Peckham, London, caused considerable interest, and led to Ekaragha becoming the third black woman to direct a feature film in England. This eight-minute film has a surprising amount to say. Three young black guys sit on a wall in a housing estate waiting for a lift to Battersea. A young white guy in tight trousers walks past and one of the guys on the wall asks why he hasn't got tight trousers. The answer? Because black guys' dicks are too big. Is this true? Well, you can go back to when the white man raided Africa and had to get rid of the black guys as the white guys' women would be too fond of them. Uh? Black guys populated the world, five continents! Then a white guy in a tee-shirt goes by, and... oh, shut the fuck up.

A quietly brilliant short with lots of playful jokes about racial stereotyping: a great debut.

Rebecca Lighieri’s Les Garçons de l'été (2017)

 

The writer Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam writes her romans noirs, of which this is an example, under the pseudonym Rebecca Lighieri. Les Garçons de l'été is essentially about multiple trauma and revenge, and might initially seem overloaded at 440 pages. But it's not, and this is a very powerful and highly readable book told by several narrators.

Thadée and Zachée are brothers of almost the same age, 21 and 20 respectively, both are academically brilliant, and both are huge enthusiasts of surfing. Their girlfriends – Jasmine and Cindy – are devoted young women. The brothers' parents are the chemists Mylène and Jérôme (who is having an affair with Maud), and have a young daughter, Ysé.

It's Thadée who is the problem, although the readers don't know this when he is forced to return home from La Réunion, cutting his one year stay short: he's been chewed by a bulldog shark, and will have to have a leg amputated. Thadée believes that Jasmine will no longer be interested in him, changes personality, broods and spends a long time just staying in bed doing a different kind of surfing: the internet.

Mylène is obviously devastated, and all the more so when Zachée too becomes a victim of the surf. Or rather, he's a victim of the tremendous ego of Thadée, a person whose hatred and egocentricity knows no bounds: he is responsible for the death of his brother Zachée, and although several people suspect this there's not a shred of evidence to prove it, and certainly Mylène doesn't even suspect what a monster her son is.

The beautiful Anouk, though, the girlfriend of a friend of the brothers, is well aware of what kind of person Thadée is, and has always been: before Thadée's accident, she chose at a party one evening to take a piss in the woods, and unbeknown to her Thadée was lustfully watching: he tried to rape her, and at the same time almost strangled her. She said nothing, but the trauma remained.

Cindy is inconsolable when Zachée, the one love of her life, is dead, and she knows Thadée is guilty of his death. One day, she gets talking to Anouk and learns that she hates him too. Although Thadée has left home, Cindy gains access – via the pre-pubescent Ysé – to his computer, and works out where Thadée is. With Anouk, Cindy goes to Thadée's hideout and tatoos his face, irreparably disfiguring him.

And the final word is with the very intellectually advanced Ysé, whose only friend – her mother being traumatised by the death of Zachée and the disappearance of Thadée – is the slightly backward (in comparison to Ysé) Jordy. Troubled by a 'poltergeist' for some months, Ysé discovers that it's Thadée, and orders him to leave: the result of which is that Mylène becomes permanently psychiatrically disturbed, Maud moves in with Jérôme and Ysé becomes more attached to Jordy, acknowledging that he's making considerable progress.

Reading this back, the book sounds like a pile of bullshit, and yet it's not at all: Lighieri writes in an almost graphic language which is attuned to different varieties of French, notably verlan. A joy to read.

Jean Becker’s L'Été meurtrier (1983)

Jean Becker’s L'Été meurtrier is based on Sébastien Japrisot's novel L'Été meurtrier (1977), and is a complex and powerful psychological work, a superior revenge thriller. Isabelle Adjani (Elaine/Elle) won a César for best female actor, and although she initially turned down the role because of the nude scenes she would have to play, she changed her mind and cinema is the better for this decision: this is a significant film in the history of French movies.

L'Été meurtrier at first perhaps seems a conventional enough love story, although a series of flashbacks to some extent explain the reasons for the movie turning around a strange bend. The very sexy 19-year-old Elle flounces around the village in Provence she and her parents – Paula Wieck Devigne (Maria Machado), or 'Eva Braun'* as some villagers call her, and her disabled husband Gabriel (Michel Galabru) – have moved to, and she causes quite a stir. She particularly stirs Fiorimondo Montechiari (Alain Souchon), nicknamed Pin-Pon, and the feeling is mutual: Elle swiftly moves into Pin-Pon's family home, causing quite a stir there. Pin-Pon can't believe his luck, although Elle's open nudity and insulting behaviour and comments hardly have the same effect on Pin-Pon's mother (Jenny Clève), but the almost deaf aunt 'Cognata' (Suzanne Flon) understands more than many give her credit for.

But then, many things here are only half or not at all understood, and (for instance) Elle's literal and figurative short-sightedness is only an indication of the misunderstandings that surround the events in this film. Elle is the product of an especially brutal rape of her mother by three overgrown yobs, a fact of which she is aware, and as the film progresses it is evident that the balance of her mind – already greatly disturbed – becomes increasingly so when she learns  the truth. The man who has been her true father tells her that he killed the rapists, that he no longer has an interest in his own fate, and Elle understands that her years of research have been in vain.

Elle goes mad and has to be institutionalised, although Pin-Pon thinks (as Elle originally did) that the two are still living. So he has to kill two innocent (if contemptible) men. This has a sniff of Greek tragedy: a brilliant film.

* The film is set in the late seventies: Paula is German by origin, and at the time the French hadn't forgotten the Nazi atrocities, so Franco-German racism was still the order of the day with some people. 

Jessica Hausner's’s Amour fou (2014)

Interestingly, Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) and his work has received a wealth of attention from film makers, notably Miloš Forman's Ragtime (1981) based Michael Kohlhaas, and Éric Rohmer's La Marquise d'O... (1976) based on Die Marquise von O.... 

Heinrich (Christian Friedel), in despair with life, first tries to get Marie (Sandra Hüller) to join him in a loving suicide pact, although she politely refuses. And then, when Henriette (Birte Schnöink), wife of Voglel (Stephan Grossmann), discovers that she is terminally ill, she agrees to the pact. And so Heinrich first shoots her dead, and then killed himself at the age of thirty-four. Unlike the way things actually happened, though, in the film it is later discovered that Henriette had been incorrectly diagnosed, and that she in fact was perfectly healthy.

A very strange, yet very enthralling film.

Lucie Borleteau’s Fidelio, l'Odyssée d'Alice | Fidelio: Alice's Odyssey (2014)

 

Fidelio, l'Odyssée d'Alice, Lucie Borleteau's first feature, is an unusual film in that conventional gender roles are reversed. Here we have an old cargo ship in which the highly attractive Alice (Ariane Labed) starts working. She leaves behind her Norwegian boyfriend, graphic novelist Félix (Anders Danielsen Lie) and discovers that the captain Gaël  (Melvil Poupaud) is her first love from some years before when she was a trainee.

The inevitable happens and Alice and Gaël get together again sexually, although for a clearly intelligent young woman Alice is stupid enough to take a selfie of them both in an uncompromising position, which when they return to dry land Félix discovers on checking Alice's photos. 

Odyssey? Well, Alice may have covered a number of places, but she's no female Ulysses, just as Félix is no faithful cat: he's been out on the tiles and in spite of Alice wanting him back he's not too sure about that.

Fyzal Boulifa's Lynn + Lucy (2020)

 

This film concerns two young women – Lynn (Roxanne Scrimshaw) and Lucy (Nichola Burley) – who live in Harlow, Essex, and have been friends since they were very young: at school there were suggestions made that they were lesbians. They now live oppoosite each other on a new housing estate. 

They are opposites in a number of ways – Lynn is introverted, wears dull clothing, and married young with a daughter Lola (Tia Nelson); Lucy is the partying kind, wears her hair blue and usually has a silver Puffa jacket. Lucy lives with her boyfriend Clark (Samson Cox-Vinell), and doesn't seem too happy to be the mother of baby boy Harrison.

Lynn sweeps the floor and makes tea for the customers in a hairdresser's, although her loyalty to Lucy will soon be severely tested when Harrison (actually her godson) is shaken to death: Clark or Lucy? Locals paint their opinion of the couple in huge letters – on Clark and Lucy's front door: 'FUCK OFF', on their car: 'SEE YOU IN HELL'. The hairdresser gives Lynn her first opportunity to cut someone's hair when Lucy walks in the salon: she hacks it off, and the shorn Lucy goes home to kill herself.

A startlingly realistic film of a working-class community, which is Fyzal Boutifa's first feature.

Kieran Evans's Kelly + Victor (2012)

In 2000 Niall Griffiths published Grits, a powerful novel of marginals in Aberystwyth, and this was followed the year after by Sheepshagger, also a very powerful story, written in the vernacular, of marginals in Wales. One of Griffiths's influences is Ron Berry, although I'd guess that there is also an attempt to write like James Kelman in another locality. It seemed that a very promising, very talented new novelist was immerging, and then Kelly + Victor, set in Liverpool, was published in 2002. I found this very disappointing compared with the previous two novels, but then Griffiths was writing at the pace of a novel a year. His friend Kieran Evans chose to make a feature film of the third novel.

This is certainly an improvement on the book, although there are inevitably many differences. Kelly meets Victor at a club, they go to her place, snort coke and have sex, during which Kelly bites Victor. But Victor can't get Kelly out of his mind and when they next meet they go to Sefton Park,  the Walker Art Gallery, and seem like a perfectly normal love-struck couple.

But then there's the next sex session, in which Kelly displays her sadistic tendencies by drawing 'K + V' glass on his back with a piece of broken glass. It's hardly surprising that he breaks off with her, although with great difficulty for Victor, who even tries out his own masochistic tendencies by practising auto-erotic asphyxiation.

It's when Victor finds Kelly in the street after being beaten up by a former boyfriend that he rushes her to hospital and they briefly become partners again. Briefly, that is, because during sex she keeps half-strangling him, which is a great pleasure for them both until she reaches the moment of no return and accidentally kills him. I was wondering how Victor would die in the film, as I couldn't imagine Kelly playing with his internal organs by fisting, as in the book.

As I said above, the film is an improvement on the novel, although billing this stuff as a modern love story seems to being going way too far.

Jessica Hausner’s Little Joe (2019)

Alice (Emily Beecham) is a London scientist working in a laboratory creating new plants and, working in particular with Chris (Ben Whishaw) and Bella (Kerry Fox). Separated from her partner Ivan (Sebastian Hülk), she is a single parent who lives with her adolescent son Joe (Kit Connor), who sees his father who lives in the country.

Alice has named her new 'child' – a remarkable plant – after her son and called it Little Joe. Little Joe is a plant which gives off oxytocin, and as such can make people happy. The possibilities for the success of this plant are self-evident, although tests must be carried out to ensure it is safe and doesn't produce unpleasant side effects. She does, though, act against protocol and take one of the plants home for Joe.

Bella is an older member of the laboratory team with a history of mental illness from which she has occasional relapses for which she self-medicates. Bella lives for her dog which comes into contact with Little Joe and which Bella perceives as behaving strangely. So strangely, in fact, that Bella claims the dog has changed to such an extent that she no long recogises it: she has it put down. And what's more, she believes the change was caused by Little Joe, which Alice thinks is absurd.

Until, that is, she starts to look at an article in Nature magazine which makes Bella's theory look slightly less improbable. Furthermore, Bella gives Alice a USB key of unedited examples of the people who the plant was tested on, and they have noticed behavioural changes. Joe too seems to be registering changes – which of course (as Chris reminds her) are normal in an adolescent – but Alice no longer seems to recognise him, and she's becoming certain that Bella is right: there's something sinister about Little Joe.

In spite of initial scepticism, the boss Karl (David Wilmot) is convinced that it is safe to show Little Joe to the public. Alice tries to sabotage her own creation but Chris violently stops her, and the result is that Little Joe is such a success that countries all over the world want to buy it, even, says the Irish-accented Karl – and no doubt with a critical wink from Austrian co-screenwriter Hausner – from EU countries!

An intelligent film, rather surprisingly in the thriller genre.

Jean-Pierre Melville's Les Enfants Terribles (1969)

Les Enfants Terribles is a very faithful filmic adaptation of Jean Cocteau's 1929 novel of the same name, and Cocteau worked in very close collaboration with Melville, providing the dream-like voiceover. There are very strong intimations of incest and homosexuality in the film, although nothing specific.

Paul becomes ill due to fellow pupil Dargelos (Renée Cosima) throwing a snowball at him, although he doesn't denounce him, it is evident that Dargelos¹ holds some homoerotic power over him. After the death of their mother, the adolescent brother and sister Paul (Édouard Dermit)² and Élisabeth (Nicole Stéphane) live together in intimate isolation, developing a kind of secret language. They are reluctant to shed their youth.

Although Élisabeth marries the rich Michaël, there is no consummation as he dies the next day. Along with his money, Élisabeth inherits a large hôtel particulier and Paul goes to live with her. They are joined by Paul's friend Gérard and Élisabeth's friend Agathe, who loks very much like Dargelos, so much in fact that Paul comes to fall in love with her, and vice versa. This is the beginning of the real problems, and the film has something of a Greek tragedy about it.

It's easy to see why the novel appealed to Melville: his second film has many of the ingredients of the néo-noir works he become so popular for later, such as friendhship, loyalty and betrayal, etc.

¹ In Cocteau's Le Livre Blanc (1930) he reveals that Dargelos is based on a real person who had a great effect on him.

² Dermit was Cocteau's ideal in physical beauty, whom he nicknamed 'Doudou', and who also played in Cocteau's films from L'Aigle à deux têtes (1948) to Le Testament d'Orphée (1960). He lived with Cocteau, became his heir, and is buried with him in the Chapelle Saint-Blaise-des-Simples in Milly-la-Forêt.

Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Doulos (1969)

 

This film was made in 1969, although the word 'doulos' doesn't appear in a modern edition of Le Petit Robert because the word is old-fashioned slang for 'indic', or 'indicateur', meaning 'nark', or to be more up-to-date: 'grass' (as in informant). In Jean-Pierre Melville's world anyone can be a grass and people (well, men, usually) have to tread carefully. Oddly, Maurice Faugel (Serge Reggiani) treads very carefully when entering the house of Gilbert Varove (René Lefèvre) and even wipes his shoes on the mat. What's odd about that is that Maurice will then shoot Gilbert dead after Gilbert (his friend, supposedly) has lent him the gun to use (but not hurt anyone) in a forthcoming robbery.

Maurice will believe that Silien (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is his friend until proved otherwise, but then when a robbery is interrupted by Inspector Salignari (Daniel Crohem), a friend of Silien's, and when Maurice's accomplice Rémy (Philippe Nahon) is killed and Maurice himself wounded (after killing Salignari) it becomes clear that Silien is in fact a grass. Or not.

This film is a convoluted mystery trip in which nothing will be revealed to the viewer until the last twenty minutes or so, and it's therefore no surprise that this is one of Quentin Tarentino's favourite films, particularly in regard to Reservoir Dogs. OK, this is néo-noir Melville again, but this film is not only an honour to the genre, but a profound work concerning the value of friendship, the value of money, conflict of interests, the nature of trust, outsiders, greed, desire, even the wish to have done with the lot and live in peace for the rest of your life.  Just watch your back.

Éric Chevillard: L'Œuvre posthume de Thomas Pilaster (1999)

L'Œuvre posthume de Thomas Pilaster is Éric Chevillard's ninth novel and was perhaps in part inspired by Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962). Like a number of Chevillard novels, writing and the absurd hold a major place here.

The back cover contains a tongue-in-cheek illustration of what is in this book: seven previously unpublished texts by the well-loved, much lamented writer Thomas Pilaster (1934-97), whose life was brought a a brutal end. The book is edited and annotated by Pilaster's (only) friend, the poet Marc-Antoine Marson, who doesn't allow himself to lapse into hagiography. Also mentioned is that the books contains a few revelations about the role of Pilaster's wife Lise in his life and work. (Needless to say, both Thomas Pilaster and Marc-Antoine Marson are ficticious characters.)

Marson says he has known the frail Pilaster since his youth, and that the collected unpublished works here span forty-five years. Each text is prefaced by Marson's comments on them, and by the time he's more than halfway through it's obvious that he thinks they're all rubbish. In fact, Marson's friendship with Pilaster seems a very strange one because not only are his footnotes often (increasingly) critical of Pilaster, but he thinks he was a coward, heartless, greedy and possessed by an unbelievable vanity: 'Pilaster asleep, awake, he could only dream of glory'.

Marson was obviously in love with his wife Lise, who died tragically in a fall fifteen years before Pilaster died, and he was incapable of writing anything worthwhile after his wife's death. In fact, Lise (in Marson's résumé of Pilaster's life) is discovered to be rather more than Pilaster's muse at the end, and the impotent and reclusive 'writer' kills himself with his paper knife.

Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Cercle rouge | The Red Circle (1970)

Old photos play a part in Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Cercle rouge. Take the photos Corey (Alain Delon) has of his former girlfriend. Initially Corey intended to leave the photos behind on the prison desk as he departs with his possessions, although a guard gives the photos back to him. Which in fact is a good thing as it happens, as Corey can leave them in the empty safe of his former boss Rico (André Ekyan): as Corey takes the now slightly less rich Rico's money the photographic symbolism is telling: Corey's just exchanged one thing for another. We'll later see a final view of her when Corey re-visits the cobwebbed flat he's not seen since he was sent to prison, and he throws the photo of her in the bin. The girl remains nameless and about the only sight we see of her is her naked body in the bedroom of Rico's flat. Later, we'll see a very different angle on the memories of a couple, when there's a brief shot of a framed photo of the presumably dead wife of the cop Mattei (André Bourvil) on his desk at home; Mattei also shows the reluctant grass Santi (François Périer) a photo of Santi and Vogel together, proving that they do know each other. Significantly, close to the spot where Corey is to meet his future friend in crime Vogel (Gian Maria Volonté), we get a full shot of the huge wall at Saint-Loup-de-Varennes near Chalon-sur-Saône, which annouces where Nicéphore Niépce invented photography in 1822.

Just released from prison in Marseille, Corey collects money from Rico and buys a second-hand car – an American model, of course – and picks up an anauthorised traveller in this boot in Bourgogne, Vogel, who's just jumped from the train to Paris where he has escaped from the handcuffs Mattei tied him to in the sleeping compartment. The main thing is that this coincidence – two crooks by chance in the same car – brings them together.

Before buying the car Corey initially plays billiards by himself to while the time away until the showroom opens, his chalking of the cue tip designing a red circle, and the title of the film alludes to a quotation by Rama Krishna shown at the beginning of the film, about people being drawn together in this circle, even if they come from different paths, even if they have different aims. The third member of the 'circle' is to be Jansen (Yves Montand), a retired élite cop now suffering from the DTs: no one is innocent, as Mattei's boss repeatedly says.

The climax of the story is in a very long, almost silent, psychologically gripping heist in which the extraordinary skills of the three crooks are tested to their utmost when they rob a high-class jewellery store: Jansen has overcome his alcoholism, is making high-spec bullets from moulds, has even practiced his rifle accuracy to open an electronic door, and when the job is accomplished he feels redeemed, he isn't even interested in his cut. The absurdity of the situation – that the jewellery robbery of the century means that no receiver will touch such highly expensive booty is of no importance: it's the psychology, the craftsmanship, that matters.

This is néo-noir, this is about fatality, and everyone knows that the three robbers will be brought dead together in a pool of blood, much like the red circle that brought them together. For that matter, just as photos bring people together, even if they're separated from each other. A superb film.

René Allio's Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma sœur et mon frère... | I, Pierre Rivière... (1976)

 

'I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister and my brother...' is how one DVD renders the translation of Pierre Rivière's words, although this doesn't convey the gruesomeness of the slitting of the throats of his relatives. Gruesome, though, this re-creation of the twenty-year-old Rivière's actions this film is certainly is not. This is in fact a documentary-style study of the murderer's actions, based on documents put together by Michel Foucault.

In 1835 the agricultural worker Rivière (1815-40) carried out the murders in a small village in Calvados (14), Normandy, where he was born. He was sent to Beaulieu prison in Caen, where he killed himself in 1840.

Pierre's mother had shown little interest in him after the birth of his sister Victoire, and his parents – living in Aunay-sur-Odon – split up when he was four years old, which had a strong mental effect on him. Inexplicably, his mother then gained custody of Pierre, who was very attached to his father. The couple continued to meet and have children.

When Pierre was ten his mother (described by Pierre as 'hysterical') threw him and his sister Aimée out of the house and they went to live with the father. In 1934 Pierre's mother, who was financially bleeding her husband, violently threatened the father in front of her son. Wanting to defend his father, on 3 June of that year Pierre took a billhook and slit the throats of his mother (who ws pregnant at the time), his sister Victoire, and his young brother Jules. He spent a month wandering about 600 km living on grasses and roots until he was discovered.

Pierre didn't tell any lies, told those examining him that he had wished to protect his father, and his very well-written forty-page 'autobiography' is a highly remarkable piece work. Pierre's lawyer gathered doctors together, who came to the conclusion that the balance of his mind had been disturbed since he was four. On 12 November 1835 Pierre was found guilty of murder, although the death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

This is a remarkable film, and Allio's assistant Nicolas Philibert, now well known for his documentary film Être et Avoir (2002), revisited it thirty years later in his film Retour en Normandie (Return to Normandy) in 2007.