“Les femmes du 6ème étage” (2010) Directed by Philippe Le Guay

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Serendipitous find while flying to Montreal as an in-flight Air Canada film. I usually don’t watch movies on airlines because 1) they are heavily edited and 2) they now cost money. But I found myself unable to read or sleep, and it was free to watch at least – they only charged for headphones.

I went under the French menu and found this film which I somewhat randomly chose. It appeared with subtitles so I could watch in silence. So it may have a horrendous soundtrack for all I know, but…

It was a pleasant, light diversion. Jean-Louis Joubert (Luchini) and his wife Suzanne (Sandrine Kiberlain) are an affluent, conservative couple and parents in 1960s Paris. When their longtime maid quits after a tiff with the demanding Suzanne, their friends inform them that it is tres a la mode to hire Spanish maids.

They find and hire Maria (Verbeke) newly arrived from Spain, living together with some family and friends (comprised of the Joubert’s neighbor’s Spanish maids) on the 6th floor of the building owned by the Jouberts.

The lovely and young grace of Maia and her efficient work garners praise and appreciation from the Jouberts, particularly Jean-Louis. He soon finds himself growing closer to these Spanish women, becoming aware of their economic and social condition as immigrant from Franco-run Spain, and concerned with their needs and deficiencies that he was prior ignorant of. This draw of cultural curiosity couples with the sexual attraction he has for Maria, putting strains on his marriage.

It is a bright, happy, and light-comedic film. Lest it be said all French films are downers, the ending here is quite hopeful and sweet.

As a light comedy it works well. As a social commentary on the rich/poor; aristocracy/servants; Native/immigrant it uses kid gloves, pointing out some issues, but not getting too dirty or deep. That isn’t a bad thing, it treats the issue as this kind of film should.

I was disappointed how the sexual attraction between Maria and Jean-Louis ended up proceeding. I felt it was unnecessary as Jean-Louis was head-on infatuated with these Spanish women without making any part of it sexual.

The House (2011) Directed by Zuzana Liová

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The House (Dom), a recent Slovak film written and directed by Zuzana Liová, offers a nuanced take on the familiar coming-of-age genre, setting itself apart with carefully drawn characters confronting non-ideal circumstances in intriguing but believable ways.

Image via domfilm.sk

Eva (Judit Bárdos) lives in a rural village — the sort of place where life revolves around the church and the bar — with her parents, Imrich (Miroslav Krobot) and Viera (Tatjana Medvecká). Eva and Imrich both commute every day to a smallish city nearby, where she is in her last year of high school and he works as a foreman at a water bottling plant. Eva’s attendance record at school is actually fairly spotty, but that apparently doesn’t stop her from being regarded as one of the brighter students in her class — and the person to go to when you are prepared to pay another student to write one of your papers for you. Continue reading →

Goodbye (2011) Directed by Mohammad Rasoulof

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Goodbye (Bé omid é didar), by Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof, is a carefully constructed and often chilling dramatization of the impact of political events in Iran on a person who has attempted to influence the direction of her society and whose livelihood and social position have been taken from her as a result of her actions.

Image via prettypictures.fr

Noora (Leyla Zareh) is a young human rights lawyer who has been disbarred by the authorities as a result of her involvement in politically sensitive cases. Her husband, Mehrdad (Shahab Hosseini) is a journalist whose newspaper has similarly been shut down by the government. We are told that Mehrdad has gotten a job as a crane driver on a development project in the desert, which may or may not be a cover story for his ongoing involvement in underground journalism. In any case, Noora has been left alone in Tehran, constructing homemade decorative gift boxes for a little income while painstakingly attempting to carry out her and Mehrdad’s plan to emigrate from Iran. Continue reading →

Making Space for Empathy: In Praise of the Dardenne Brothers

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Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are among the most original and important filmmakers of this generation. Aside from winning a litany of awards at the Cannes Film Festival for their six feature films, they have cultivated a unique narrative style that flies in the face of genre conventions. Via this style, they have transcended the ability of most filmmakers to portray the complex struggles facing regular people with limited resources. Instead of seeking to overwhelm the viewer by packing as many high-intensity occurrences into as little space as possible, or focusing on glamorous characters that embody the viewer’s fantasies, the Dardennes tell simple, realistic stories about ordinary individuals living on the margins of society.

The Dardenne Brothers, via www.wikipedia.com

I have shown the Dardennes’ movies to several friends unaccustomed to minimalist or social realist film, and their typical reaction to the films is “so what,” or, even worse, a belief that the Dardennes are trying to get the viewer to take pleasure in the difficulties of their protagonists. One individual was bold enough to call their film Rosetta, winner of the 1999 Palm d’Or, “suffering pornography.” These reactions seem grounded in the expectations our culture has given us in approaching film, that we are going to view something packed with elements that excite us or embody our fantasies. When a movie fails to contain this content, we are either disappointed, and feel like the film was vacuous, or we assume that the filmmaker was trying to titillate us with what was contained therein, even if it would be perverse to react in this fashion. Continue reading →

Selections From Recent Greek Cinema

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Dogtooth (2009) and Alps (2011) Directed by Giorgos Lanthimos
Attenberg (2010) Directed by Athina Rachel Tsangari

Greek filmmakers and frequent colleagues Giorgos Lanthimos and Athina Rachel Tsangari have denied that their collective body of work constitutes part of a “Greek New Wave,” and Tsangari in particular has objected to the very concept of a Greek national cinema. Given the substantial crossover of acting and production personnel between these three recent films of theirs, however, it seems fair enough to consider them in light of each other.

Image via kino.com

Dogtooth (Kynodontas) gained attention in the U.S. as an unconventional nominee for “Best Foreign Language Film” at the 2010 Academy Awards. It focuses on three teenage siblings (Aggeliki Papoulia, Hristos Passalis, and Mary Tsoni) whose parents (Christos Stergioglou and Michele Valley) have chosen to completely cut them off from society. The children have no names, their home is surrounded by a tall fence, and they have been taught alternative definitions for words that might make them curious about the outside world. (For instance, they use the word “telephone” to refer to a salt shaker.) Furthermore, the parents have come up with an elaborate system of rewards and punishments (of a relatively limp and brutal variety, respectively) to ensure obedience to parental authority. Continue reading →

Tiny Furniture (2010) Directed by Lena Dunham

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Several years ago, relaxing by randomly and mindlessly perusing a certain social network, I came across a group of college-age friends in New York City that I found fascinating. On the network they publicly shared their art (varied forms) and in some cases snippets relating to their personal lives, a concept I found truly bizarre, though I realized was becoming more common in this new information age. Their existence and activities as city-dwelling, well-off offspring of artistic parents appeared utterly polar to my own life experiences. From this primarily came the fascination. Their lives appeared strongly intertwined with art and creation, and they seemed to thrive in it together. Yet at the same time there was a thread of self-depreciation, realization of privilege, doubt, and uncertainty of what they would each become that wove through their postings. Above all, however, they appeared brutally honest about their passions and faults; they appeared like burgeoning artists.

Lena Dunham (Image via www.oberlin.edu)

Their art covered a gamut of meda, but one in particular, an Oberlin student named Lena Dunham, made little videos. Obviously this particularly drew my interest. After having seen a few of her online videos, I knew I wanted to see more. Apparently so did others. She did two Webseries: Tight Shots and Delusional Downtown Divas, a hilarious satire ‘aired’ for two seasons on Index Magazine. While in college she filmed her short movie, Creative Nonfiction, which screened to positive accolades in 2009 at SXSW. Growing in popularity, she took a huge (i.e. daring) step up from Internet videos and her short feature to produce a full-length movie. This movie, Tiny Furniture, made a huge splash in 2010, garnering several Indie film awards, weeks of featured mention in Entertainment Weekly (e.g. here) and soon landing Dunham a deal with HBO to produce a show with Judd Apatow, Girls, which premiers today (with overall rave critical reviews too). Continue reading →

The Kid with a Bike (2011) Directed by Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne

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The Kid with a Bike (Le gamin au vélo), the latest film by Belgian directors and Cannes favorites Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, stands out in some important ways from their last few films. While those works focused on adults who were placed in the position of making difficult moral choices, The Kid with a Bike focuses on a child who is forced to cope with the moral choices of the adults around him, from a father who has abandoned him to a hairdresser who agrees to become his foster parent within days of meeting him.

The Kid with a Bike Still

Image via ifcfilms.com

The Dardennes have spoken of The Kid with a Bike as being somewhat of a fairy tale, and several aspects of the film reflect this, including the intense colors (le gamin likes to wear bright red almost as much as Bart Simpson does), the foreboding status of the woods, and the Dardennes’ first-time use of non-diegetic music in the form of short bursts of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto that punctuate key moments. But, like the Dardennes’ other works, this film is still rooted in the specificity of the people and events taking place on the screen, full of brief moments guaranteed to elicit nervous laughter from audiences that have grown accustomed to films in which every gesture is meant to either advance the plot or enhance the demographic appeal of the film. Continue reading →

Discipline and Punish: The Suspension of Juan Manuel Lopez

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Last month, Juan Manuel “Juanma” López lost in a rematch to Orlando Salido, less than a year following Juanma’s first career loss, also at the hands of the underdog Salido. Fans fortunate enough to catch the bout know that it was a spectacular fight, culminating in a tenth round technical knockout.

Lopez (back facing camera) and Salido show good sportsmanship after their brutally spectacular slugfest; image via www.boxnews.com.au

One learns to watch boxing with a certain expectation of something occurring to either severely limit the action or bring it to premature conclusion. This can arise from widely disparate circumstances: from two fighters not putting in much of an effort, or two styles that simply don’t mix for an entertaining bout, to accidental head-butts that cause excessive bleeding or the daffy antics of one fighter who decides to bite off the opponent’s ear. The bottom line is that entertaining bouts that can delight and surprise the fan without any interjection of controversy are rare. Continue reading →

Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) Directed by Robert Bresson

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I originally planned to feature another movie for my first entry, but on Thursday that plan altered, and Tiny Furniture will have to be pushed back (yet again) in the viewing queue. Instead, I’ll begin with what probably amounts to a more fitting work given the origins of The400Blows.com and the Easter season: Bresson.

The epiphany of writing on Au Hasard Balthazar occurred during the conclusion of the Maundy Thursday service I attended. During these final moments before Benediction the worship leaders solemnly stripped the chancel bare of ornamentation and draped crosses with black cloth. Throughout this, we the congregation sat in silent reflection. But this was a silence absent vocalization – not sound. There I sat, watching a mundane and routine orchestration as people stepped about the chancel, removed linen cloths from the altar and pulpit, carried candelabras and bannered posts into a storage closet, and shifted tables and chairs. The clang of metal, swishes of cloth, and thumps of wood punctuated this dull activity irregularly thoughout. Continue reading →

Chavez vs. Lee Set for June 16

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I just found out that, on June 16, Ireland’s Andy Lee (28-1), trained by Emanuel Steward, is going to fight Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. (45-0-1, 1NC), trained by Freddie Roach, at middleweight on HBO. Lee is a gutsy, scrappy boxer with a ton of skill and stylistic nuance. His 11th round comeback TKO victory over Scotsman Craig McEwan (19-2), in March 2011, was legendary stuff.  Lee was clearly down in the fight, looking like he might not be able to finish, but held out until McEwan was exhausted and then mounted a raging offensive surge. Continue reading →