New Films

The last couple weeks I have been eye deep in art films - Bela Tarr, Jacques Rivette - long, difficult films that invite long difficult reactions. I've let the everyday reviews slip. Time to rectify! I'm afraid these will be quick and dirty reviews, but.... I think I will even have recourse to the dreaded STARS, as a way of signalling something without bothering to write it all up.

Pan's Labyrinth (***) - very handsome, haunting film about a young girl in Franco's Spain - her father is a monster - her mother is sickening to die. Young Ofelia is in torment. She meets fairies and monsters, and soon has three tasks to complete... Beautiful film, an elegant, dark, fairy tale, with an interesting style - del Toro loves to hide cuts - shooting long tracks and pans that disappear behind trees, but cut to something else - a gimmicky effect, but one here that gives it a seamlessness that adds to its dreaminess.

The Case of the Grinning Cat (***) - Chris Marker video, in which he goes looking for graffiti of a yellow grinning cat on the roofs and walls of Paris, and finds the streets of Paris in the early years of the millenium. The metro and a series of demonstrations especially - over the election of Chirac over LePen; the Iraq war; for the homeless, to commemmorate the victims of AIDS,a nd so on. Takes a wryly leftist view - waxing sacrastic about the protesters interest in slogans over substance and especially over history - forgetting the Kurds again... But mostly lingers on faces, places, and finds cats in strange places - amusing and sweet, for all the serious underetones..... Shown with several short videos of animals - cats, owls, a zoo, Okinawan bullfights, an elephant dancing a tango...

Belle Toujours (***) - latest film by Manoel de Oliveira, an update of Bunuel's Belle de Jour, with Michel Piccoli returning in his original role, but Catherine Deneuve transformed into Bulle Ogier. Lush and wry and talky, somewhat difficult to reconcile with ones notions of Bunuel, and Ogier, for all her virtues, is a far cry from Deneuve - but pretty engaging on its own merits, and when you're as close to living to celebrate your own centeniary as Oliveira is (born 1908; going strong as a filmmaker), well - I guess you can do what you want.

Climates (***) - latest film by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkish auteur. In this one, he and his wife play a couple - photographer and designer for a TV show (I think) who break up and suffer without one another. Or, in fact, we follow him, after the first part - he mopes, he pines, he is cruel and selfish. It rains a lot. Then it snows, as he goes to the mountains to find his first lover... It's handsome, Antonioni-like in the extreme, including the handsome, unpleasant hero and beautiful, more sympathetic woman, though it is less devoted to the woman's point of view than Antonioni might be.

Curse of the Golden Flower (**) - Gorgeous but pointless melodrama about Tang emperors murdering each other. Or rather - there is the emperor who is poisoning his wife because she has seduced his oldest son, her stepson - she is plotting to overthrow the emporer with her (natural) son, the smartest and best of the family who the emperor is planning to make the successor to the throne (everyone ignores the gentle innocent third son). There's a doctor and daughter who are poisoning the empress - turns out his wife is the emperor's first wife - alas, their daughter is having an affair with the first son (ie, her brother). All this comes out in the end. A bloodbath. Everyone dies, except the stars. Not enough fighting - the attraction of these films is Ching Siu-tung.