Just a few films for the beginning of August.

Les Bonne Femmes (1960), directed by Claude Chabrol. This is Chabrol’s third film, and it is a strange character study that focuses on four shop girls. Jane (Bernadette Lafont), Rita (Lucile Saint-Simon), Jacqueline (Clothilde Joano) and Ginette (Stephane Audran) are all clerks at a light fixture and electrical appliance store owned by a flamboyant old tyrant (Pierre Bertin). The film begins with a shot of the Arc de Triomphe, an irony if there ever was one. The Paris we see here is drab to the point of dullness (in Alexander Pope’s sense), neon at night with loud clubs and nudie shows, a public swimming pool, a zoo with animals in small cages (we get the point!) and an array of shops. The four young women have little ambition beyond finding a man. One woman sings at a cabaret at night, and another has a creepy fellow with a motorcycle who follows here from place to place, and another has a stuffy boyfriend. None of these young people has much of a life beyond a dull job and nights of carousing. There is a bit of a mystery here, and things do not end well for the young woman who finally encounters the motorcycle man. None of these women has much beyond kitchen appliances in her future. Just as the women lead dull lives, the film delivers dull entertainment with just a whiff of misogyny. 

 

L’Amour Braque (1984), directed by Andrzej Zulawski. Supposedly based on Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, this film is idiotic in the extreme. Kinetic, loud, boisterous, confusing, fast-paced, wild, and overly flashy, L’Amour Braque is a film easy to dislike. And I disliked it. The violence, the misogyny, the crassness, the pretentiousness turned me off almost from the beginning. I say “almost from the beginning,” because the first scene in which Disney-masked men rob a bank is fun, and we have a bit of cavorting that is reminiscent of scenes from The Joker. Such cavorting, however, soon becomes tiresome. No one here has a trace of likeability, although the camera enjoys lingering over the face of Sophie Marceau. She is one of several women in the film who appear abused and in undress for no apparent reason. The title translates as ‘Mad Love’ but the only madness here is madcap capering by all involved. Characters say they are in love, but I find no love here, just plenty of human behaviour that is demeaning. If I were you, I would not go out of my way to see this film. Perhaps it captures the 1980s and films penchant for kinetic editing that surfaced in music videos of the time, but this does not make it an involving film – or even interesting in any satisfactory way.

The Children Are Watching Us (1944), directed by Vittorio de Sica. This is an amazing film, partly because of the compelling performance of Luciano De Ambrosis as the child protagonist, Prico. Prico is a five-year-old child caught in a family experiencing dissolution because of the mother’s adulterous affair. We watch as young Prico does typical child things: ride his scooter, play in a hayloft, try to swim, and so on. We also look on as Prico watches his parents squabble, and as he peers in puzzlement as his mother meets a strange man in the park, or as he looks through windows or bannisters at goings-on he does not understand. The camera work recording the watching and the playing is fluid with long tracking shots that seem to depart from characters, to intensely intimate close-up shots, to the masterful final shot of Prico turning from his mother and walking the length of a huge cavernous room and departing through the doors. As I watched, Henry James kept coming to mind. Like James, De Sica and his screenwriters, especially Cesare Zavattini with whom De Sica collaborated on many films, are sensitive to the child’s bewilderment in a world of adults whose actions he does not comprehend. This poor kid is passed from one adult to another, from one place to another, while his mother and father attempt, vainly, to work out their differences. This is a film that deals with daring themes, especially the break-up of a family, themes that went against Fascist values of the time. Quite remarkable.

 

Stromboli (1950), directed by Roberto Rossellini. The first of five films Rossellini made with Ingrid Bergman, Stromboli brings together the Italian realist style with Hollywood melodrama. The action mostly takes place on the isolated volcanic island of Stromboli. Here Karin (Ingrid Bergman) finds herself a fish out of water, newly wedded to Antonio (Mario Vitale), a humble fisherman. Karin is Lithuanian and has survived the war using any means available; she now finds herself, rather unwillingly, in a strange and even hostile environment. She married Antonio while in an internment camp because her application for an Argentinian visa failed. Now she finds herself in a place she cannot abide.  Her attempts to have the local priest and then the local lighthouse keeper help her get away prove less than successful. She is beside herself, finds that she is pregnant, and decides to cross the island on her own to find a boat to somewhere else, anywhere else. The film has the volcano, flying birds, barren rocks, thrashing tuna captured in huge nets, a ferret and a rabbit, labyrinthine pathways to communicate the emotional inner life of the film’s protagonist. The island contains elemental life, life in extremis. Simple Antonio cannot understand why his wife does not just settle in and conform to the ways of the island, ways Karin finds primitive and uncivilized. The ambiguous ending has Karin wake near the top of the mountain to express a sense of renewal, although whether this sense of renewal means she will return to the village and her husband or continue on her trek across the island to find escape remains unclear. This is a slow bubbling boiling film.

 

Europe ’51 (1952), directed by Roberto Rossellini. This is the second of Rossellini’s collaborations with Ingrid Bergman, and it tells the story of Irene Girard (Bergman), the wife of a wealthy American living in Rome with their son, Michel (Sandro Franchino). Feeling neglected and unloved by his parents, especially his mother, Michel dies after trying to commit suicide by throwing himself down a spiral staircase. The spiral is a motif that turns up elsewhere in the film as a reminder of the spiralling out of control that enters Irene’s life after the loss of her son. The film reminded me of Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor (1963) in its narrative arc. Europe ’51 is, of course, quite a different film from Fuller’s raw portrait of a descent into madness. Irene may end up in a mental institution, but she is decidedly not mad. She is more saint than insane. Rossellini positions Irene between the Marxist left and the Christian right. She quotes scripture, much to the consternation of a priest. She is at the bedside of a dying prostitute. She works in a factory and decides the labour market is more aptly thought of as a slave market. She seems most content with a gaggle of children about her. Her desire is to spread relationship and love, and of course this desire must be thwarted by the “powers that be,” men! Irene’s activism does not conform to either the right or the left politically, and consequently she is made to suffer. This film sits comfortably alongside Rossellini’s Joan of Arc at the Stake (1954).

 

Journey to Italy (1954), directed by Roberto Rossellini. Here is a film that looks forward to Anotonioni, Godard, and Wenders in its use of space and its concentration on the existential tangle of its characters. The two main characters are Katherine (Ingrid Bergman) and Alex Joyce (George Saunders), an English couple on a trip to Naples to sell a villa that Katherine has inherited. Finding themselves alone for the first time in a long time, Katherine and Alex discover they do not like each other. She spends her time visiting museums and archeological digs, and he spends his time flirting with other women. We have Vesuvius to remind us of emotional turmoil below the surface of things, and Pompey to remind us of life’s brevity and life’s surprises. In other words, the setting becomes another character influencing these two English persons. The interaction between these two is fraught with tension. Things reach a crisis when the two, encapsulated in their metal automobile, find themselves amid a throng of pilgrims following a statue of the Madonna. They must emerge from their encasing and enter the throng, resisting the pull of the acolytes. Here in this moment of fervour, they realize their love for each other. 

 

Maigret and the St. Fiacre Case (1959), directed by Jean Delannoy. Starring Jean Gabin as Inspector Maigret, this is a traditional whodunnit. All the elements are here: country village with an assortment of characters, big country house with faded aristocracy, local priest, and seven suspects for what Maigret thinks is a murder, although the local doctor has issued a death certificate stating “heart attack” as the cause of death. And indeed, Maigret’s friend, La comtesse de St. Fiacre (Valentine Ressier) does die from a heart attack while sitting in a church pew. She has just opened her missal and discovered a newspaper clipping inside. This causes her heart attack. Who could have placed the clipping there? Who would want this unassuming woman dead? Is it the wastrel son? Or the ne’er do well secretary/art critic? Or the priest, the doctor, the grounds keeper, the grounds keeper’s son, the driver/butler? Maigret will sort things out. He gathers all the suspects at a dinner to expose the dastardly murderer. All this is carried out efficiently and nostalgically. There is nothing left to take from this mansion except the 12:15 train.