Not Naruse

I am going to try to post a weekly recap of the Naruse films seen. I hope to work up something longer as well, but that's not likely to come here until next week. Meanwhile - I saw other films last week, and here they are:

My Sex Life (or How I Got into an Argument):**** - a long, but brilliant, French film about an assistant philosophy professor and his circle of friends and lovers. Full of characters, swirling around the central pair, lots of back and forth - and an amazingly rich and varied style. Glorious film. The shifting points of view, the odd rhythms, the way things are played funny and sad and weird all at once - Arnaud Desplechinsturns a very conventional type of film (French intellectuals on the mope) into something surprising, engrossing, and thrilling to look at. I'd seen this before on video, but missed the aesthetics of it - this time, even on a rather sketchy print, I could see - Desplechins uses everything he has to turn a film about a bunch of people talking into a feast for the eyes. Sometimes films like this come off wrong - too flashy, almost desperate, trying to make static material look interesting - this film doesn't. Like last year's masterpiece, Kings and Queen - also starring Mathieu Amalric and Emmanuelle Devos - the style conveys the sense of people bursting at the seams, which they are, in their talky ways. It's wonderful. Assisted mightily by the cast - Amalric and Devos were marvelous together - she smiles and smirks through all kinds of fights and sarcasm, breaks down, when he starts getting sentimental... Every scene is a surprise - a flow of emotion, back and forth, out the other side. The rest of the cast is just as good - especially Jeanne Balibar (as a very canny nutcase). Desplechins may be telling Paul's story here, but he gives other people their time - spending time away from the central character, following his friends for a while. A great movie.

Mutual Admiration *** - Andrew Bujalski's follow up to Funny Ha Ha. Same style, similar characters - slackers, this time in Brooklyn... The main slacker is a musician named Alan, a scruffy, nerdy, indie rocker who has just moved to Brooklyn without his band. He hangs around, looking for a drummer, drinking too much, running up credit card debt, not returning calls, and almost stealing his best friend's girl. Like Funny Ha Ha, it is deceptive - the simplicity, lack of overt drama, awkward sounding conversations hiding the care that goes into structuring those conversations and getting them to come out right. It's shot in black and white and looks a bit gloomy and claustophobic, which it probably is. It is also, at times, uproariously funny - in a kind of understated way....

Dial M For Murder **1/2 - on TV when I got home from Saturday's Naruse, so I watched it. Looks nice, but it's a pretty dull whodunnit in the Columbo mode (albeit well before Columbo). Very stagy - Hitchcock perhaps trying to make a virtue of limitations (the one room set, mostly), without quite managing it.

Keane ***1/2 - intense and sad film about a man, probably schizophrenic, who hangs around the Port Authority bus terminal in NY, looking for his daughter, who disappeared while he was watching her. He keeps reenacting the scene - watching the clock until 4:30, trying to spot the man who took her... The rest of the time, he beats back the voices in his head with booze and coke... Then he meets a waitress with a daughter and problems of her own - she pulls him in to her life a bit, and then has him babysit her daughter.... Ebert's review gets at the effect this has - we know what kind of man Keane is - we have seen him in the throes of his madness - we have also seen him (in the scenes with the waitress, especially) calm, rational, effective. The suspense comes from wondering what will happen - and from the fact that we know that Keane himself is feeling more or less exactly what we are feeling. He knows himself - he is as desperate to make it through this as we are....

It is very hard to take. Kerrigan puts us right next to Damien Lewis, his actor - the camera sticks to him like a Dardennes brother's film. At times, it's as if we are the voices in his head - he suffers, we stare, never giving him an inch... It's heartbreaking, this film - we are buried deep in Keane's sadness. We see that he could have been a good father, if only he were healthy. And we - who know what he is really like - ache for the waitress, who does not know what he is like. To her he is kind, down on his luck, and all she has to go on. Just a hugely affecting film.