About Parallax View
Moments out of Time
Parallax View Presents
Seattle Film Critics Awards
Review: Das Boot (2019)
By Sean Axmaker
by Sean Axmaker, streaming, Television
Das Boot shares the same title as Wolfgang Petersen's 1981 film (and is technically a sequel), but familiarity with the original is unnecessary to start the series. Also based on the novel Das Boot by Lothar-Günther Buchheim as well its sequel Die Festung, the 2019 series is set in late 1942, nine months after the film's finale, with a new crew, a new mission, and a new vessel.
Klaus Hoffmann (Rick Okon), a young, inexperienced officer with a military hero father, is promoted to captain of U-162, much to the resentment of First Watch officer Karl Tennstedt (August Wittgenstein) and a crew loyal to the veteran officer.
Continue reading at Noir Now Playing
DVD: 'Claude Autant-Lara: Four Romantic Escapes from Occupied France' on Eclipse
by Sean Axmaker, DVD, Film Reviews
Claude Autant-Lara: Four Romantic Escapes from Occupied France (Eclipse, DVD)
Confession time: I had never seen a film by French director Claude Autant-Lara before this set and frankly had no concept of his reputation beyond the distaste that the critics-turned-filmmakers of the La Nouvelle Vague held for his work. He was the tradition of quality that they rebelled against.
Eclipse Series 45
A little background on Claude Autant-Lara. He worked in the French film industry for almost twenty years as an art director, costume designer, and director before making Le mariage de Chiffon (1942), his first commercial success as a filmmaker in his own right. That it was made during the German occupation of France (and the French film industry) in World War II makes it all the more intriguing: under the strictures of Germany's oversight of filmmaking in France, Autant-Lara found a story that passed German censors and appealed to a demoralized French population, and he revealed a style and sensibility that celebrated the French character. That quality is found in all four films in Claude Autant-Lara: Four Romantic Escapes from Occupied France, a collection of three comedies and one tragic drama all starring Odette Joyeux and set in more innocent times past (historical picture were easier to pass by German censors).
Set in turn-of-the-century France, Le mariage de Chiffon stars Joyeux as the 16-year-old Corysande, who prefers the nickname Chiffon, much to the dismay of her society mother who would see her behave like a proper young lady of wealth and position. Chiffon isn't quite a tomboy but she is much more interested in hanging around the airfield where her beloved Uncle Marc (Jacques Dumesnil), the brother of her stepfather, has devoted his fortune to getting the first airplane in France airborne. Marc is an idealist, called "mad" in the village for his experiments but championed by Chiffon, who dreams as big as Marc does. When Chiffon discovers that the effort has bankrupted him on the eve of his first success, she accepts the marriage proposal of an elderly Colonel (André Luguet), a charming old fellow who is smitten with the young Chiffon from the moment he first sees her searching for a missing shoe in the street.
Continue reading at Stream On Demand
Blu-ray: French classics 'The Love of a Woman' and 'Spotlight on a Murderer' from Arrow
Blu-ray, by Sean Axmaker, DVD, Film Reviews
Jean Grémillon was one of the great French film directors of the golden age with a career that spanned from the end of the silent era through the late 1950s, but is one of the least known to American audiences and very few of his films are available in the U.S. (in fact, the only previous releases I'm aware of are three films on the Eclipse set Jean Gremillon During the Occupation). The Love of a Woman (France, 1953), his final feature, confronts a modern theme in the rural, conservative culture of an island community of sailors off the coast of France.
Arrow Academy
Micheline Presle is the new community doctor, a single, relatively young woman who must prove herself to a population suspicious of outsiders and a culture steeped in chauvinism. Massimo Girotti is an Italian engineer working on the island who challenges the provincial attitudes as he romances the doctor, but too is trapped in traditional views of marriage and forces her to choose: love or career. It takes on themes that were also being grappled with in American cinema after the war with a sympathetic portrait of women professionals in a culture that constantly challenges them to prove themselves and demands they sacrifice career for marriage. The choice is put into focus when the retiring schoolteacher, the doctor's only real friend on the island, contemplates retirement as a spinster.
Blu-ray: Sacha Guitry's 'La Poison' on Criterion
Actor, director, and playwright Sacha Guitry was a giant of French cinema as writer, director, and star of a series of witty and inventive movies from the 1930s through the 1950s. For his weirdly exuberant black comedy La Poison (1951) he gives the lead to the great Michel Simon, who plays a gruff bear of a gardener who has come to hate his wife of 30 years and plots her murder while she (Germaine Reuver) plots his. When he hears a radio interview with a lawyer (Jacques Varennes) celebrating his hundredth successful acquittal, he uses the lawyer to (unwittingly) guide him through the perfect murder. Perfection here is a matter of degree, of course. He doesn't mind being caught. He just wants to remain free to enjoy his life as a merry widower.
Guitry's cinematic invention is less visual than narrative. He has a flair of creative storytelling and verbal dexterity and most of his films are energized by his presence in the leading role. While Guitry is not the in film itself, he personally introduces the cast and crew like a master of ceremonies in the memorable credit sequence, then steps back and lets his witty dialogue and creative storytelling techniques speak for him. The radio broadcasts commentary and counterpoint to their wordless meals together, for instance, an effusively romantic song as their body language suggests suppressed violent impulses followed by a radio play of bickering spouses voicing their internalized feelings.
Blu-ray/DVD: 'Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles'
"A singular work in film history," begins the description on back of the case of Criterion's release of Chantal Akerman's astounding Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (France, 1975).
That is no hyperbole. Jeanne Dielman is a painstaking, excruciatingly exacting portrait of the life of a perfectly organized homemaker, an epic portrait of a quotidian life where every gesture through the 200-minute study becomes important and the slips in routine reverberate like aftershocks of an earthquake. It's astounding to realize that Akerman was only 25 when she put this uncompromising vision on the screen. It's almost as astounding that this landmark work took so long for finally arrive on home video in U.S. Almost impossible to see for decades (it wasn't even released in the U.S. until 1983 and was rarely revived in the years since), this singular work made its DVD debut in 2009, presented by Criterion in a magnificent two-disc special edition. Criterion has now remastered the film for its Blu-ray debut.
Middle-aged widow and single mother Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig) lives a carefully structured life with a clockwork routine. She wakes up before dawn, sees her son Sylvain (Jan Decorte) off to school, cleans every last dish in her tiny and spotless kitchen, then continues on with the errands and duties of her day. One of those duties just happens to be servicing an afternoon client as a part-time prostitute. Jeanne is all business when the bell rings and she puts the pot on low simmer to welcome her client for the day. It's creepily expressive the way Akerman frames her head out of the shot when she answers the door, matching Seyrig's inexpressive formality with each man.
Continue reading on Stream On Demand
It can't happen there: film (non)publications in the land of the frogs
By Alan Williams
by Alan Williams, Commentary, Essays
[Originally published in Movietone News 34, August 1974]
Please forgive me if I begin with a rather farcical personal story, which will hopefully illustrate a point. A little over a year ago a friend and teacher of mine, the French critic Raymond Bellour, asked me to redo a piece (on a Howard Hawks film) which I had once written for him for a book on the American cinema he was to edit. It was to be an anthology on American film with a special section on close analysis of representative films, generally from a semiotic point of view. (I must apologize again; textual analysis of film is more or less my specialty—I have no excuse for this except that I find it rather interesting.) After much trauma and typing I produced a version of my text which, with a final set of revisions, was ready for the book—then almost a year behind schedule due to a particular disease known well among writers, procrastination. Most of the other people to contribute (the rest of them writing directly in French, hence burdened with fewer problems than I) were in various stages of work on their pieces when we all received a cheery little photocopied note from the publisher: due to economic difficulties the book would not, after all, come into being.
Parallax View's Best of 2019
Forced Closure: Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
I Wake Up Streaming – August 2019
Review: I Am the Night
Review: Piranahs
I Wake Up Streaming – July 2019
Japanese Girls at the Harbor
I Wake Up Streaming – May 2019
Implosion Round: 'John Wick: Chapter 3' Pushes it to the Limit
A Rich and Varied World: Highlights of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival
Nuff Said: 'Avengers: Endgame' Nails the Dismount
Review: Trouble is My Business
I Wake Up Streaming – April 2019
High Life: Harsh Mistress
by Andrew Wright
by Bruce Reid
by Claudia Gorbman
by David C. Chute
by David Coursen
by David Willingham
by Greg Way
by James Monaco
by Jay Kuehner
by Jeff Shannon
by John Hartl
by Judith M. Kass
by Kathleen Murphy
by Ken Eisler
by Leland A. Poague
by Peter Hogue
by Peter Richards
by Pierre Greenfield
by RC Dale
by Richard T. Jameson
by Richard Thompson
by Rick Hermann
by Robert C. Cumbow
by Robert Horton
by Sheila Benson
by Tom Keogh
DVD / Blu-ray Reviews
Seattle International Film Festival
Cinema Scope
Cinema Scope Online
Critic Quality Feed
David Bordwell's Website on Cinema
Film Society of Lincoln Center Blog
filmjourney.org
fipresci
J. Hoberman
Jim Emerson's Scanners Blog
Jonathan Rosenbaum.net
Missing Movies
Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism
Moving Image Source
Overlook Podcast
Parallax View on Rotten Tomatoes
SeanAx.com
Straight Shooting with Richard T. Jameson
The Crop Duster (Robert Horton)
The House Next Door
What A Feeling! (Robert Horton on the 80s)
All articles copyright by the authors