Burl reviews La piscine! (1969)

 

Hé-ho, c’est Burl, here to review a film about the very French! Yes, I’m languorously languishing on a chaise longue on the Côte d'Azur, most of the buttons on my white cotton shirt undone, Ray-Bans in place, Gauloise between my fingers, thinking inscrutably existential thoughts! Ha ha, the scenario I’ve just described applies with some frequency to the movie I’m discussing: La piscine! 

Our setting is an estate just up the hill from the seaside, equipped with a lovely swimming pool and some spectacular views! Living here, though not themselves the owners, are a couple, Jean-Paul, played with typical handsomeness by Alain Delon from Un Flic, and Marianne, essayed in a more relatable performance by Romy Schneider from Purple Noon! They’re on vacation and have borrowed the house from acquaintances, and seem to be having a pretty romantic time of it, ha ha!

But things change when their pal Harry roars up in his peppy sports car! Harry, played by Maurice Ronet from Elevator to the Gallows, is an old friend of Jean-Paul’s, but also an ex-lover of Marianne’s, a history to which he constantly, winkingly refers! And he’s brought along his shrinking violet daughter Pénélope, played with extreme gorgeosity by Jane Birkin from the similarly sunny Evil Under the Sun! For a while this arrangement trundles along, with the quartet eating dinners, sitting around the pool, and so forth, and there’s even a brief party!

With its Mediterranean locations, beautiful people, and virtually the same cast, it strongly recalls Purple Noon, the more so when, eventually, there’s a murder! I won’t give things away, because part of the fun is the slow burn, during which you’re watching tensions and awkwardnesses ramp up slowly at first, and then quickly, and you wonder how exactly the tension is going to release! It’s not a suspense picture, nor a mystery, but both of those qualities are present, even if not in a form familiar to the fan of the detective genre!  

There is a detective, though! Paul Crauchet from Un Cercle Rouge turns up late in the picture as L'inspecteur Lévêque of Marseille, and he conducts his investigation with apparently all the craftiness of, say, Alastair Sim in Green For Danger, but with none of the results! Ha ha! There was something very realistic but also strangely laissez-faire about his police work, and I liked what that brought to the picture!

And I liked the relaxed continental pace of the movie, the wonderful décors, the contrast between its sunny look and its dim outlook, and, if I didn’t care much for the characters themselves, I appreciated what the actors brought to them! Everyone was good in their roles! When we learn that Jean-Paul has had some emotional problems in the past, and even tried his hand at suicide, Delon’s performance makes a little more sense; and the character of Harry is someone that we’ve all met in the past! And, ha ha, Birkin’s character is the most hilariously disaffected of all, despite not herself being French! Yes, as a slice of late-60s French Riviera life, the picture is nonpareil, though for some I suppose it will be too slow and uneventful! Me, I give La piscine three bottles of Johnny Walker Red!

Burl reviews Dortoir des grandes! (1984)

 

Eh bien, bonjour les gars et les gamines, c’est Burl! Ha ha, today I’m reviewing a French picture for you, and how very French it is! Way back in the mid-80s, when this movie was new, my friend Doug somehow managed to tape most of it onto a VHS cassette, which we then watched over and over again! But the beginning of the movie was missing, and we didn’t know the title, so we referred to the picture as Dormitory F!

Of course the movie was packed to the brim with naked ladies, which accounted for the bulk of its appeal, but it also featured a scene in which the ladies visit a punk club and listen to a catchy song we called “Ansari Anse!” For years since then, I sought out both Dormitory F and that catchy punk song, but being as how I didn’t know the proper titles for either of them, this proved difficult! But once again Doug came to the rescue: once again by mysterious means he found the movie, put it on a little flash drive instead of a VHS tape this time, and gave it to me, and now it’s my pleasure to reveal the proper title of the picture: Dortoir des grandes!

That translates most directly to Senior Dormitory, but I believe the standard English title for it is College Dormitory! In any case, I was excited to see this movie again after so many years of it living (and growing and mutating) in my imagination! It turns out to be the tale of a girl called Adeline, who, her father being dead and her mother who knows where, lives with her stepmother and the stepmother’s creepy doughboy sweetheart! When these two start getting cozier with her than she would like (pulling her into the bathtub, spiking her drinks, double-teaming her in her bed, that sort of thing), Adeline’s superhuman equanimity finally fails her and she demands to be sent to a private school for girls!

The bulk of the picture plays out at this academy! The other girls are reasonably welcoming, with the only holdout being Juliette, the bad girl, who becomes jealous! Good-natured Mowgli, who I guess is called that because she’s black, becomes Adeline’s good pal, and all the girls are pretty cuddly with one another when you get right down to it! Fanette, the dean, is a very pretty lady, but a grouchy and insecure one who is prone to having affairs with her students! Her current objet d’amour is Juliette, and boy does Juliette get steamed when Fanette’s interest shifts to Adeline!

Instead of a plot, the movie simply features scenes of the girls doing stuff! They take group showers of course, and massage one another, and play little pranks on their teachers, and at one point they lock the dean in her room and have a dorm party with some invited boys and a poster of Rocky watching over them! Of course the highlight is the visit to the grungy basement punk club, where a band called Les Porte Mentaux play a song not called “Ansari Anse,” but rather “Ah ca ira!” Ha ha, I can’t tell you what a pleasure it was to finally see this scene again after all those years, and hear that catchy song! And the scene is just terrific all around, and brought back memories of my own visits to grungy basement punk clubs! Though I don’t recall the punk ladies taking their tops off and dancing around as happens in this picture, and also the bathroom seen here is the nicest punk club bathroom anyone ever heard of, ha ha! Normally you feared for your life in those bathrooms, and if you were smart you stayed out of them altogether! (It was the germs you feared, mind you, not your fellow punks, who by and large were a pacific bunch off the pogo floor!)

So all that was great, and it’s nice that in the last quarter of the film, after a suicide attempt that nobody seems to worry overmuch about, the location shifts to the Caribbean, where Adeline accompanies Mowgli for an erotic holiday, and then the arrival of Fanette complicates matters slightly, and the whole thing takes on a Melody in Love sort of a vibe! But otherwise I must admit that the movie is fairly desultory, with no art and precious little craft in evidence! The script is very piecemeal and the characterizations extremely confused! It’s mainly a series of scenes in which people grope and snog one another for a while before they invariably cut abruptly to a new scene! I’m not sure if more explicit stuff was snipped out, but I don’t really care either because, naked ladies notwithstanding, the bohankie scenes get boring and repetitive as always seems to be the case with pornoo, or near-pornoo! Still, I enjoyed it because it brought me back to those days when movies like this were a big deal! Ha ha! I give Dortoir des grandes, the former Dormitory F, two posters of Ator the Fighting Eagle!

Burl reviews Purple Noon! (1960)

 

Allons-y sur le bateau, c’est Burl! Yes, it’s a French picture today, the first cinematic adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s debut Ripley novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley! The movie was retitled Plain Soleil, but is known to the English speaking world by the nonsensical but evocative title Purple Noon! So it’s a story virtually everyone is familiar with, from seeing The American Friend or The Talented Mr. Ripley; but for Purple Noon , the initial kick at the can, they really Frenched it up! And that’s no bad thing!

Tom Ripley, played by Alain Delon from Un Flic, is the poor hanger-on who has apparently been asked by the father of a rich playboy called Philippe Greenleaf, essayed by Maurice Ronet from Elevator to the Gallows, to bring his wayward Philippe to San Francisco! Whether this is actually the case is questionable: Ripley, we discover, is the sort of fellow who’ll say whatever is most convenient to him whether it’s true or not; and at one point Philippe claims to hardly know him!

By the time the characters are sailing around on a beautiful yacht, it’s pretty clear that Ripley’s default mode is covetousness, and that what he covets are Philippe’s lifestyle and his ladyfriend Marge, impressively played by first-time actor Marie Laforêt! Philippe treats her abominably; in one harrowing scene, outraged that she’s not giving all of her attention exclusively to him, Philippe tosses the manuscript she’s working on, about the fresco painter Fra Angelico, overboard and into the sea! Perhaps it’s at that moment that Ripley decides he must be killed; certainly it was when I decided it, ha ha!

But Tom doesn’t kill Philippe because he thinks there’s anything wrong with his behavior - indeed, he himself wants to behave just like Philippe! Billy Kearns from Playtime is another playboy, Freddy Miles, an American friend of Philippe’s who dislikes Ripley and becomes suspicious of him, and so must be disposed of by a violent bonking! And when this is done, Ripley, by clever manipulation of poor Marge, is ready to repattern his life as Philippe’s, and the only thing standing in his way is the filmmakers’ determination to end their movie differently than Highsmith ended her book! Ha ha!

For a movie that contains exactly zero characters one is disposed to like, and traded a perfectly sensible ending for one redolent of Production Code morals, this is an awfully nifty work of picturemaking! Ha ha, Delon’s performance nails the character exactly: a good-looking guy most people dislike on sight, who can play along with the fun times and is quick and clever enough to extemporize his way out of almost any situation, but who still exudes an air of dull desperation! The rest of the performances are excellent as well, and the Mediterranean location shooting from master lens-smith Henri Dëcae is fabulous, like a bright colour version of the same year’s L’ Avventura! René Clement, the director, pulls off the required tone without seeming to try anything specific at all, and that counts as an achievement in my book! It’s got a rich texture and a quiverful of subtleties, and beautiful people to look at and loathe! It’s a terrific picture and I give Purple Noon three dangling hands!

Burl reviews Un Flic! (1972)

 

Eh bonjour, est bonne année, c’est Burl! Today I have a review of the last feature made by the great Jean-Pierre Melville! Now, he’s best known for his crime pictures, of course, but he worked in other genres too, like the French Resistance genre! But this picture, Un Flic, or, in English, A Cop, is most certainly a crime picture! Ha ha, with a dirty street Santa popping up at one point, it’s also in part a holiday picture!

But it’s a slightly oddball one! For starters, although the movie is called Un Flic, and although the big star Alain Delon, known from his appearance as a pilot/stickman in The Concorde… Airport ’79, plays the titular taciturn flatfoot, it’s the criminals who get more screen time! And Delon’s cop character, Edouard, is a pretty robotic and unpersonable fellow, driving around, forever receiving calls on his police radio, being handed the phone by his partner, and intoning the exact same little phrase every time! I guess the idea is that being a police detective is not the glamorous world the earlier films of Jean-Pierre Melville had led us to believe it might be! Ha ha!

Richard Crenna from First Blood and Summer Rental plays the main thief, Simon, and things kick off with a bank heist set in a stormy off-season beach city, and though the thieves get some of the boodle they sought, they don’t get it all, and not only that but one of their number catches a bullet! By garr! However, the purpose of this heist was merely to finance another heist, and on this point it is successful enough!

We spend time alternately with Edouard and with Simon, and occasionally with both of them, because it turns out that they’re pals! Not only that, but the share the same sweetie pie, a radiant blonde played by Catherine Deneuve, that classy hemogobbler from The Hunger! Then we get the picture’s showpiece, which is Simon’s second heist! Ha ha, he climbs from a miniature helicopter to a miniature train, changes from his boiler suit into a debonair housecoat, then bonks a drug courier about the head and takes his narcotic-filled suitcase before shinnying back up to the miniature helicopter! Ha ha, it’s a terrific sequence!

The whole picture is shot in the sort of steel-blue patina we may recall from Playtime, and indeed the bank building at the beginning looks like a leftover set from that Tati classic! The picture is consistently engaging, with well-managed suspense and drama scenes, all leading up to the sort of ending popular in French crime pictures since Breathless, or for that matter since Pépé Le Moko! It’s pretty thin gruel so far as characterizations go, however, and the sense of doomy inevitability it’s trying to foster never really takes hold! But it’s a fine crime feature, and, even if not up to Melville’s finest work, a decent capstone to his career! I give Un Flic three curly-cord carphones!

Burl reviews Playtime! (1967)

Allez-vite la twist, c’est Burl! Ha ha, I’m here to review what’s probably one of my most favourite comedies, Jaques Tati’s crazy-crazy Playtime! This is a real humdinger, a spectacle of a show, and I first saw it many years ago in a film class, on a reasonably large screen! And the bigger the screen, the better with this one! I know it got a bit of a revival a few years ago, but I’d like to see this one grace the big screens again, alongside other revival staples like Gremlins and Ghostbusters!

But hélas, I fear that will never be, because Playtime was a big fat old bomb when first it was released! It’s sad but true, and perhaps the fact that it has absolutely no plot had something to do with this flame-out! But Playtime has no need of a plot, ha ha! All it needs is gags and plenty of time for them to play out, and that it has, three times filled and running over!

Our non-story is set in Paris, or at least in an artificial modernist Paris constructed somewhere on the outskirts: the area is full of American tourists being shepherded here and there by a legion of minders; the only glimpses of Paris landmarks we see are reflections in glass doors: an Eiffel Tower here, a Sacré-Coeur there! Among the tourists are old ladies, a pretty young woman called Barbara, who serves more or less as our main character, and a loudmouthed drunk who wants to buy everybody drinks! There is also Tati playing his famous Chaplin-esque character M. Hulot!

Oh, I’m fond of Hulot! He’s one of the most genuine naïfs in cinema, even as he looks like an everyday late middle-aged white guy! He’s a bit rumpled, which means he stands out sharply in the steely world of Tati’s fake Paris, but so do all the other lookalike Hulots with which Tati has generously sprinkled his film! Ha ha, I guess he was getting a little tired of the character, but for us, a little more of the genuine article would not have gone amiss!

Ha ha, and so many great gags, many stemming from everyday items acting as agents to undermine the modern way of life they represent! The chairs in the waiting room, the long hallway, the door at the restaurant, the roundabout outside, and my favourite, the labyrinth of cubicles and the woman in the turning booth! Ha ha, you’ll know that one when you see it! And the subtleties sometimes are beautiful! Think about “Slam Your Doors In Golden Silence,” ha ha - most filmmakers try to get a laugh by adding a sound effect, while Tati is one of the few who can achieve hilarity by taking one out!

It’s a movie that demands, and equally rewards, multiple viewings! It seems designed to require multiple viewings, in fact: it’s impossible to watch the picture without occasionally feeling that you’re completely missing a good joke! And you probably are! New gags reveal themselves with each fresh look; it’s incredible - you can perhaps see in this a diabolical salesmanship on Tati's part: make three times the box office just based on everybody going back to look for the jokes they missed the first or second times! 

Ha ha, if you need a laugh about our crazy modern world, this is the movie to watch! Its observations have only become more relevant in the years since it was made, even as the world itself seems to have gotten uglier! Sure, without proper characters or plot, it can be somethingt of an alienating experience; you never get closer to understanding the characters than to feel a basic human empathy for their various plights! But ultimately you still walk away with a greater understanding of what it means to be human! I give Playtime three and a half shouting security panels!

Burl reviews Band of Outsiders! (1964)

Et tu, c’est Burl! Hé hé! Yes, I have a French picture for you today: a small delight from Jean-Luc Godard entitled Bande à part, or, for the Englishers, Band of Outsiders! Of course we know Godard from his first picture Breathless and the many other great films that came after, and the confounding ones too, ha ha! I’ve never met the man myself, but I did sit directly behind him once at a cinema as the movie played, and I count that an appropriate encounter!

I suppose Quentin Tarantino must have taken his company name from this picture, and that computes because it’s a crime drama more or less, like the marvelous Breathless was, but even more Godarded up, and with characters who love gangster movies, and plenty of discursive scenes! Here we have two buddies, Franz and Arthur, adrift and disreputable, who meet the winsome Odile in an English language course, and, while both angling for her favours, try to convince her to help them pull a robbery on the rich old man who boards in her aunt’s house, where Odile also lives!

Odile is played by Anna Karina from Justine; Sami Frey from Sweet Movie and Black Widow is Franz; and playing Arthur with an ever-increasing sense of potential violence is Claude Brasseur from Eyes Without a Face! This trio crack against one another like multiballs, with the two fellows putting increasing pressure on Odile to help facilitate the robbery, and the fellows getting increasingly fractious with each other over Odile! For some reason Odile falls for Arthur, who, ha ha, is a real jerk, and one is afeared of another ending like that in L’Avventura! (I’d seen this movie before my recent viewing, but not for years, so I couldn’t remember how it resolved!)

Narration from Godard himself occasionally gives us insight into the characters’ thoughts and feelings, and this is an ingratiating feature indeed! On the debit side is how they treat their nifty little car, ha ha! Of course the centerpiece of the picture, the scene everybody remembers, which, notably, has nothing to do with either the romantic conflict nor the supposed heist plot, is the spontaneous dance scene in the café! Ha ha, they must have practiced that one a couple of times, and that’s the great charm of the scene! Somehow, having nothing to do with anything, it increases the emotional stakes and sets our characters on their way into the second half of the movie!

Well, it’s all very Godardian and beautifully styled, even if it takes place in a rather bleak Parisian winterscape! Ha ha, it’s still Paris after all! It’s got more thrills in it than I remembered - in my memory it was a movie about people who wanted to do a crime, but were simply too lazy to go about it! But no! The heist happens, but of course it doesn’t go exactly as planned! And that’s to be expected with Godard, ha ha! I suppose this is one of his minor works, but it’s a solid little piece of New Wavery, and the cast is terrific, particularly the lovely Karina! I’m extremely fond of Band of Outsiders, and I give it three and a half high speed runs through the Louvre!

Burl reviews Sweet Movie! (1974)

By Trotsky’s beard it’s Burl, here to review a movie about the death of revolution! That’s right, I’m talking about Sweet Movie! Ha ha, have you seen this picture? It’s a wild and weird one, but nothing in it will come as any great shock to those who’ve seen WR: Mysteries of the Organism, the previous film from director Dušan Makavejev!

Well, a few things might be a little shocking, ha ha! Like WR, Sweet Movie is a sort of pastiche or collage film, with revolution as its general subject and the naturally, if regrettably, ephemeral nature of same!

But much of the movie demonstrates the need for it, too: revolution is not futile; in fact is necessary, so long as there are people like Mr. Dollars, the world’s richest man, a Howard Hughes-style clean freak who assumes he can buy and sell people as he pleases! This entity is played by none other than John Vernon, well known from Herbie Goes Bananas, Fraternity Vacation, and Curtains! Ha ha, Herbie fans in particular will be taken aback when Vernon gets his kit off to reveal that he has a solid gold willis! (Vernon too was reportedly taken aback when he saw this at the film’s premiere screening!)

Another person taken aback by this is Miss Canada, played by the comely Carole Laure, whom we of course know from Get Out Your Handkerchiefs and Naked Massacre! She, who had won the Crazy Daisy Show contest to marry Mr. Dollars, is packed away in a suitcase by a big bodybuilder and sent to the Eiffel Tower, where she makes sweet love with El Macho, played by Sami Frey from Band of Outsiders and Black Widow, and emergency attention is soon required, ha ha!

Meanwhile a boat, the Survival, with the head of Marx on the prow, captained by the homicidally revolutionary Anna Planeta, glides down the canals of Amsterdam! It picks up a sailor called Potemkin played by Pierre Clémenti from The Conformist, and pretty soon, after affixing a single tear to the giant Marx head, Anna and Potemkin are rolling around in the big box of sugar, making sweet love, ha ha, but a couple of gory bites and a knife-poking later, the sugar is bubbling with blood! There’s also a very queasy scene in the ship’s sweet shoppe, in which a group of young boys are “seduced” by the lingerie-wearing Planeta!

Miss Canada has by now hooked up with Otto Muehl’s Vienna Aktionists, who are doing their thing in a warehouse somewhere! Ha ha, these bits of the movie might cause viewers some little disquiet: there is all manner of gross foodeating, rank upchuckery, regression to babyhood, and of course a notorious scene of platform pooping! Miss Canada, and indeed Carole Laure, doesn't seem to be enjoying her experience very much! Even worse than all of this, for me, was the German documentary footage of unearthing corpses in the Katyin Forest, which I wish Makavejev had resisted putting in his movie! It’s really awful, gruesome stuff! I didn’t care much for the baby gymnastics either, ha ha!

However, after a friendly reappearance from Mrs. Alplanalpe, played by Jane Mallett from Nothing Personal, the old painted lady whom we’d seen earlier on the Crazy Daisy Show, the sugary theme of the picture reasserts itself! Miss Canada immerses herself in a vat of chocolate and rolls around in it nude for a while, and that’s a pretty good scene! But it’s a sad scene, too - it seems to represent a surrender of some kind, a drowning of ideals in crass, confectionary-excreta!

But the final image offers hope: a row of apparently murdered children, wrapped in plastic, who slowly shuffle out of their wrappings and reveal themselves as an alive, alert new generation, ready, we hope, to continue the struggle! Workers unite, ha ha, you have nothing to lose but your plastic wrap! Anyway, Sweet Movie is an intriguing blumpkin, a relic of a sadly bygone age, and beyond all question an earnestly felt combunction! I give it two and a half strips of yellow suckers!

Burl reviews Clouds of Sils Maria! (2014)

Eh bien, ha ha, c’est Burl! I’m here with a recent French picture, Clouds of Sils Maria, which comes from Olivier Assayas, the fellow who brought us Irma Vep! I really should watch Irma Vep again one of these days – I had a fine time seeing this one by myself in the movie house when it was released those many years ago, then walking home in the rain humming “Bonnie & Clyde” to myself the whole way! Ha ha, memories!

But it’s Clouds of Sils Maria I’m here to talk about today, and this picture is something of an echo of that earlier Assayas joint! Juliette “Godzilla” Binoche, who apparently provided the original idea for the picture, stars as an aging superstar actress taking part in a tribute to the writer of Maloja Snake, a play about the romantic power dynamics between an older and a younger woman! This is the play that made Binoche’s character a star many years earlier when she played the ingénue role! Ha ha!

But things have changed and continue to quickly change! The venerated playwright kicks the bucket, the tribute becomes a memorial, and Maria, our older actress, is offered the older-lady role in a new production of Maloja Snake! She holes up in the stunning mountaintop aerie owned by the late playwright and begins running lines with her personal assistant Val, played by Kristin Stewart of American Ultra! Of course the relationship between Maria and Val mixes and blurs with that of the characters they’re reading, and this is further complicated by the troubled young starlet, played by Chloe Grace-Moritz, who is cast in the younger role!

So you can see there are a lot of games going on in the situations and even in the casting, ha ha! Some of them work and others fall flat, or are a bit too obvious, but one gets caught up in the scenario nonetheless! Of course aging and the perceptions that come with it are major themes, and one offshoot of this is the curiously hefty amount of screen time given to scenes of Val trying to convince Maria that blockbuster Hollywood pictures can contain the same thematic and emotional weight as any rarified art film or theatre play! Ha ha, and I guess this is what leads to a mysterious disappearance late in the picture!

The phenomenon alluded to in the titles of both the film and the play-within-the-film provides one of the picture’s strongest moments! The Maloja Snake is a ribbon of low-drifting cloud that winds its way through the mountains near the playwright’s lovely home, and though the characters don’t see it, we do, and it’s a pretty good trick effect too, I must say!

The movie has a few longeurs, and I can’t say I wanted these characters as my new best friends, but the picture is engaging and the acting strong! It also appears to have been shot on film (by Yorick Le Saux, who also shot Only Lovers Left Alive), and it looks great! It’s of course a picture in the tradition of Persona and Cries and Whispers, but I don’t think it quite rises to the level of those marvelous classics, its high-altitude location notwithstanding! Ha ha, I’m going to give Clouds of Sils Maria two and a half pairs of granny panties!

Burl reviews Holy Motors! (2012)

Hé hé, Burl ici to review a new, and long awaited, picture from the great Léos Carax! I’ve always enjoyed his pictures, right from Boy Meets Girl and through the time I saw Carax himself introduce Les Amants du Pont-Neuf! And what a fine picture that was! Still haven’t seen Pola X though, ha ha!

Well, I just caught up with his new one, Holy Motors! I’ll tell you right off the top, I was simply enchanted! It’s a movie about movies if there ever was one, an encomium and elegy not to cinema itself, but to its mechanical parts: the film camera and projector – the holy motors of the title!

Of course Denis Levant is the star, as he has been of all, or just about all, of Carax’s past works! He’s always been one of the most talented physical performers since Keaton if you ask me, but here he outdoes himself and turns in a performance that really ought to collect quite a few awards at the end of the year, though I’m sure Daniel Day-Lewis or someone like that will take the salmon once again!

What’s the plot, you might wonder? Ha ha, don’t even ask! Do you remember when I said that in The Visitor it seemed anything could happen at any time? Same deal here! Denis Levant plays a number of roles, as he is enacting “appointments” all over Paris which dramatize situations from the fantastical to the cliché to the dramatic but banal! He travels by a limousine driven by none other than Édith Scob from Eyes Without A Face, a film which gets heavily namechecked by more even than Scob’s presence! She’s pretty gorgeous, by the way!

The appointments are frequently bizarre or violent, and a prosthetic penis figures in at least one of them! The penis is oddly shaped, looking something like Lowly Worm from the Richard Scarry books! Ha ha, he’s the worm who wears a bowtie and a Tyrolean hat, but in Holy Motors, the penis is wearing nothing at all! Nothing at all! Nothing at all!

It feels a bit like a dumping ground, and apparently that’s what it is – a bunch of story ideas Carax had amassed over his last dozen years of relative inactivity, all thrown into a stewpot and simmered at low heat! But it’s the tastiest stew to come along in some time! It feels a lot like a David Cronenberg picture at times (he too has just made a picture which takes place largely in a limousine, ha ha!), and the music reminded me at least once of one of those chilly Howard Shore scores from the early 1980s!

The movie can be a bit on the nose at times, as when Levant complains about the dwindling size of cameras, or when Scob dons her mask, and a bit crotchety-old-man in its attempts at humour, as with the url-sporting headstones (Egoyan rather than Cronenberg here!); but these moments are few and their impact minimal!

I always mark it as a great moment in cinema when I walk out of a movie wondering how in hockeysticks it ever got made! Enter the Void was a bit like that, and so were Naked Lunch and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas! There are others too, and I love ‘em! Holy Motors fits into that group like a crouton in a duck, and I’m proud to give it four homemade Spider-Man masks!

Burl reviews Breathless! (1960)

Bonjour, c’est Burl ici! Ha ha, aujourd’hui je vais revué le film À bout de souffle, par le grand réalisateur Suisse-Français, Jean-Luc Godard! But no, this whole review won’t be in French! I would make too many mistakes in my grammar, I think, and would thereby annoy my French readership, if I even have a French readership!

À bout de souffle is of course known as Breathless in English, and was Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature! I’ve been a big Godard fan for a long time, and until I watched this picture again the other night, I hadn’t seen it in years! Ha ha, it’s a great picture! I knew that of course, but I had a fine time reacquainting myself with this Gallic classic and realizing just how much it managed to change the motion picture arts as we know them!

Of course this wasn’t the very first movie to take the camera off the tripod and ignore the established rules of editing and mise en scéne, but it was among the first, and certainly was among the most popular! On top of that it’s a lustily entertaining picture, a movie about movies that’s a more effective tribute to the medium than a thousand of those stultifying “Aren’t Movies Great” Oscar night montages could ever hope to be!

Maybe you’ve heard of the movie but haven’t seen it, thinking to yourself “Ha ha, it’s just another boring, impenetrable avant-garde art picture!” No way! It’s a racy and thrilling crime romance that’s of much more than historical interest to anyone who appreciates a good genre exercise! The hero, Michel Poiccard, is played by the incomparable Belmondo, and is a Bogart-worshiping small-time Parisian crook who steals a car and then, cornered, commits a casual copicide! All the flics of France are after him then, but before he can flee the country, Michel needs to do two important things: get his hands on the money that’s owed him for past thieveries, and woo his tentative, impossibly cute American girlfriend Patricia into a dedicated, Bonnie-and-Clyde state of love! Then the two of them can run to Italy, and to freedom!

I won’t repeat the encomiums so many others have lavished on this picture! Ha ha, you’ll just have to see it for yourself and invent some of your own! You’ll be captivated by Belmondo and his habit of running his thumb over his upper lip in imitation of Bogie; with Jean Seberg and her fantastic pixie cut and New York Herald-Tribune t-shirt; and with Paris itself, just for being Paris!

One last note: I’ve often wondered if there was any connection between the character Laszlo Kovacs who is so often mentioned in the film, and the real-life Hungarian cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs, who shot Easy Rider, Ghostbusters and of course Butch and Sundance: The Early Days! Ha ha!

I give Breathless four enthusiastic Gauloises, and encourage you to check it out with all haste!

Burl reviews Eyes Without A Face! (1959)

Hi, it’s Burl! Ha ha, I’ve long enjoyed movies from France, and today I thought I’d review one of that country’s fine films! This picture, Eyes Without A Face, was made during one of the nation’s real moviemaking heydays, the late 1950s, just as Truffaut and Godard and people of that sort were really gearing up!

Eyes Without A Face has a plot that will seem very familiar to many of you, but that’s because the story has been remade countless times in many different iterations, many of them by that old rascal Jess Franco! Yes, there’s a mad cosmetic surgeon, and yes he has a daughter who, through the scientist’s reckless behaviour, has been facially disfigured! And yes, a series of young and comely women are recruited as unwilling face donors for the daughter, but there is always something that goes awry with the operation, trapping the doctor, his matronly assistant and his near-innocent daughter in a descending spiral of murderous violence and weird science!

Ha ha, what a great picture! It’s beautifully shot by the great Eugen Schüfftan, who, as you know, developed the Schüfftan Process, a fantastic trick effect you should look up, and also shot such an oddball array of pictures as The Bloody Brood, The Hustler and Chappaqua, many G.W. Pabst films, a René Clair movie or two and, early in his career, in a strange premonition, a German movie called The Stolen Face! He also secretly shot Edgar Ulmer’s Strange Illusion, so they say, though another cameraman was credited, ha ha!

And though you’d never guess it, for a French movie made in 1959, this film is exceptionally gory! You get to see faces sliced right off, and let me tell you, audiences of the period were not used to seeing such outrageous grue! It’s a truly Great Moment in Horror when the surgeon begins scalpeling around the periphery of a young lady’s face and the blood starts dripping out of the wound slowly and realistically, Savini-style!

The smooth, eerie mask worn by the daughter is the film’s key visual element, and the scenes in which she drifts sadly about the house like a particularly lachrymose ghost are pure pictorial poetry! Ha ha, and although most of the movie takes place in some far-removed banlieu, there are still some breathtaking shots of Paris, particularly of its trains, that remind me of how much I love monochrome photography of the City of Lights from this era! It makes me want to watch a Jean-Pierre Melville film now, please!

I heartily recommend this beautiful, gory, hypnotic movie, and am pretty sure you’ll enjoy it too if you give it a look! Billy Idol certainly seems to have liked it! I present it with four pearl chokers and a fulsome ha ha!

Burl reviews Pépé Le Moko! (1937)

Burl reporting for duty! Ha ha, it’s time to review an elderly classic, the fine, exotic French crime picture Pépé le Moko! It’s a colonial picture, which is a genre I like quite a bit – movies about consuls, for example, and especially dipsomaniacal ones, are usually fine entertainments for the likes of ol’ Burl!

But this is not a consular movie! It’s the tale of the most famous robber of Algiers, Pépé le Moko, who is beloved throughout the Casbah and is hidden within that labyrinthine quarter by its devoted denizens, who revere him because he’s the most charming and accomplished thief who ever was, and also something of a Robin Hood figure! Whenever les flics come in to arrest him, the good people of the citadel band together to baffle and misdirect them away from their debonair folk hero! This of course frustrates the cops to no end! The Shareef don’t like it, ha ha!

But of course, should Pépé dare to leave the Casbah, he’ll be nabbed by the men in blue the moment he ventures out! So while he rules the quarter and commands total respect from its inhabitants, he’s pretty much a prisoner there! Ha ha, he’s tired of being trapped in there, and tired of his beautiful gypsy-eyed girlfriend! The story follows him as he falls in love with a fancy-pants Parisienne, whom he happens across while she’s slumming one night in the Casbah, dripping with jewelry and briefly on the lam from her old frog-faced industrialist of a boyfriend!

Well, Pépé succeeds in capturing her heart, but now he must outwit the sly, patient police officer who has befriended him, and seems always able to find him just to have a chat now and then, but still amiably maintains that one day Pépé will screw up, and there he, Inspecteur Slimaine, will be, waiting with handcuffs at the ready and his fez cocked at a rakish tilt! It’s a great template for all the sympathetic cop-criminal relationships seen since in the movies, with Heat being a particularly good example!

This is the movie that made Jean Gabin a big star and led to him trying his hand at Hollywood in Moontide! And no wonder, because in the role of Pépé he’s as suave and slick as can be, but manages to display both a fundamental decency and an absolute ruthlessness at the same time, all swirled up with the chewy romantic center you’d expect to find in any Gallic master criminal! Of course the picture ends on a note of high romantic tragedy, of the sort we don’t hear played much in movies these days!  

The centerpiece of the picture is a long scene in which the local snitch, who’s managed to manipulate one of Pépé’s very closest pals into getting nabbed, is cornered by Le Moko and his gang and has to sweat it out as they get closer to the truth of his treachery! It’s a good scene, with this old grass sweating bullets and playing what he begins to realize will be his last hand of cards! I also liked the exotic atmosphere of the movie, which actually was partially shot in Algiers! The rest was shot in Parisian studios I guess, but the Casbah atmosphere is thicker than mule paste throughout!

I give this fine old classic three and a half ill-timed foghorn blasts!

Burl reviews Point Blank! (2010)

Hi, Burl here with a review! No, this isn’t the great John Boorman picture of the late 1960s, but a Gallic concoction of the same title! But the plot is totally different, so don’t go worrying, as I briefly did, that this is some sort of remake! (The Boorman movie was already sort of remade as Payback, starring that loony-tune Mel Gibson!)

This Point Blank is an entirely different plate of cod! It seems a man is on the run from gun-toting thugs in Paris, and he gets hit by a motorbike! He’s sent to the hospital and hooked up to tubes, but the thugs are still after him; and when the police discover that he’s a career thief, they’re on his tail too! One thug attempts a homicide by that classic method of cutting some tubes, but the thief is saved by a nurse-in-training named Samuel!

Well, one thing leads to another, and Samuel’s very pregnant wife is kidnapped, and to save her Samuel is forced to spring the thief from the hospital and out from under the noses of les flics! From then on, as Samuel discovers who his true enemies are, the plot becomes a series of chase scenes and suspense bits, with an increasingly desperate male nurse just trying to find his wife! It’s not a bad idea for a movie, and many of the suspense bits and the action scenes are well handled! 

The nurse is a pretty sympathetic character, and a genuine everyman who doesn’t suddenly develop awesome fistfighting skills out of nowhere, ha ha! The thief is a pretty good bad guy/good guy amalgam, but we don’t learn much about him beyond that! And the bad guys are a pretty hissable bunch, although some of their strategies are almost laughable in their stupidity! I know I laughed pretty hard, ha ha! (And I’m being deliberately vague about who the bad guys are – it’s extremely obvious, and it’s not kept a secret for very long, but since this movie hasn’t got much in the way of narrative turns, I’ll leave that one as fresh as I can for you potential viewers out there!)

But there’s nothing very cutting-edge about the movie! It’s pretty boilerplate stuff, and there’s not much that sticks with you after it’s done! French action movies come in two types, it seems to me: the over-the-top ones that Luc Besson usually has something to do with, and all the rest! This one is totally non Luc Besson, so it doesn’t go to crazy extremes trying to imitate classic Hong Kong action, which is a blessed relief; but on the other hand it doesn’t do a whole lot else either!

On balance I’d say it’s a pretty decent action picture, more realistic than most, and a fine way to while away eighty-three rapidly-paced minutes – well, less actually, since the end credits seem to be about six minutes long on their own! I’m going to give this one two aged, angry policewomen – a neither-here-nor-there rating which fits this particular movie perfectly! Ha ha!