Yasujiro Ozu

On an island off the Queensland coast for a week, with dark worn timber floors, low couches, bamboo matting on the walls, watching the films of this, the master of making the same film over and over. Intricate dramas of choice in marriage. Whether to marry or not. The same actors over and over. The camera always at bartop height, peering upwards at characters. The viewpoint of an old man sitting in a deckchair. The sense akin to peering through a glass bottomed boat into a submerged world where rituals of today are performed alongside rituals of an extinct time. 'Autumn Afternoon'. 'Floating Weeds'. 'End of Summer'. 'Early Spring'. 'Late Spring'. 'Late Autumn'. 'Early Summer'. Only 'Equinox Flower' seemed a slight dip, or of less interest, the lack of familiar faces combined with the centreless story, but a petty quibble for this the most satisfying and consistent of directors. 'Floating Weeds' being the favourite by a nose, with its satisfying symbol of the drama troupe as the film-crew and their flat performances as the cinema screen, the audience bored but immobile.

Lady Chatterley (2006)

French adaptation of the second Lady Chatterley novel ('John Thomas and Lady Jane') joins the queue of failed adaptations of Lawrence's final novel.
Irresistible the temptation to make a filmed version with carte blanche for heaps of 'justified' bucolic sex in the English countryside, but why French? The actress (Marina Hands) is lovely enough, fit to play lead in the film of Audrey Tatou's life, but no Connie, who is unquestionably English, plump, and sensual, not fey and boyish. The Clifford is about right, puny, scornful, meagre as a man (Hippolyte Girardot). But Parkin is all wrong. Rufus Sewell should play Parkin or Mellors, a re-run of his turn in 'Cold Comfort Farm'. Not this middle-aged grump, the bizarrely named Jean-Louis Coullo'ch, who moved the apostrophe in his surname for this film's credit to Coulloc'h.
No, this won't do. It's plain and boring, and more than a little redolent of soft-core. The book is full of dialogue, arguments, discussions, debates and verbal love-making, but this scriptmaker has stripped out everything not absolutely essential to pushing the plot forward, a good rule for film-making maybe, but not for adaptations of poetic fiction. There are long scenes where these fascinating characters say nothing to each other at all, when there is so much to cram into the 135-minute running-time. As for French actors playing characters with English names, referring to English place-names (Wragby, Uthwaite), this only heightens the sense of how absurd the whole project is. How much wiser it might have been to produce a French re-telling of the story, 'Rules Of The Game' meets 'Diary of a Chambermaid', give all the characters French names, and call the whole thing 'The Game-Keeper'. The recent BBC adaptations ('Daniel Deronda', 'Jane Eyre', 'Persuasion', 'P&P') have set the bar very high for filmed literary classics. Work like this looks very pedestrian and plain by comparison.
I'd like to see a 'Lady Chatterley' without sex scenes. That would test a director and make them get everything else right.

Exterminating Angels (2006)

A director interviews a number of young French film actresses while casting his next film. Certain scenes will involve them in acts of lesbianage, cunnilingus, and attempts to perform a transcendental orgasm on camera. Most of the interviewees storm out, correctly identifying the bloke posing as a director as a cheap sleaze. Perhaps it's his creepy good looks, or that stare...
Eventually he finds two girls prepared to undergo the ordeal of being in a mediocre sexploitation flick.
Oops, sorry, cunningly contrived titillation that should just squeeze past the board and get a screening at film festivals. People will queue up to see it, too, because the poster can show a topless chick without misleading the audiences about what they will get on screen.
The idea's a good one (investigate the erotic power of women through interviews between a director and potential actors in his next movie), but the result is a low-range soft-core that might as well have been made in the late Seventies. But for haircuts and the high polish of the finished image it was.
The French have done their level best to marry art and porn. Several generations have had a jolly good go, and nobody has really pulled off the coup. Prompting once again the question, What is the deal with porn?
Why can't the French get lucky and combine art and porn with success? 'Romance' didn't really work either as drama or as arousal-material. Catherine Breillat went over the problem intelligently in 'Sex Is Comedy' which is actually a good film about a director trying to coach young actors in performing sex acts for the camera. 'Exterminating Angels' is simply the latest in a long line of duds. Most other efforts look like a poor man's re-tread of David Hamilton.
The litmus test is simple to conduct. Any amateur should be able to perform it at home.
Take out the sex scenes from a film and all scenes leading up to a sex scene, contrived purely to arouse, and what do you have left?
If there is still a solid plot-driven drama in which all the characters' motivation hangs together logically and coherently throughout the story, which also has a measurable degree of forward momentum, inclining us to watch to the end and feel satisfaction in and of the story itself, then we have something that can be said to be a decent film.
It's really irrelevant to the question of it being a good film whether or not it has sex scenes. There are good films with sex scenes, there are good films without. Most great films don't have them. But that is probably because of prevailing taboos at the time which obliged writers to sublimate their desires into symbolic forms, which become in the best cases cinematic images. A good thing for great cinema on the whole.
It has recently been shown by science that the sight of a nude woman alters the male brain so terribly that he cannot choose between 'red or white' (wine). We can also say that putting sex scenes in to a filmed drama unbalances the male mind to the extent that bad films are usually result. Bad films like 'Exterminating Angels' (not to be confused with Bunuel's masterly 'Exterminating Angel', a film to which this has no relation whatsoever. So why the title, Monsieur Brisseau?)
It would be possible for instance to pop in to perfectly good films sex scenes, and a board might be set up by the French government, or the council of the San Fernando valley (where most porn production takes place) to perform this useful function.
Take a perfectly wonderful film like 'Claire's Knee' or 'To Have And Have Not' and have directors and actors work carefully to interpolate scenes at regular intervals where the lead characters are seen getting it on, running the full gamut of sexual positions and now-ritualised 'steps'.
It might be a balancing response to what the Christians are doing in the States, bowdlerising movies by taking out the 'unclean' bits.

RIP: Bergman, Antonioni

A double window at the shop in Carlton to commemorate the passing of two greats. Thoughts along the lines of 'the old way of making cinema has passed', but Bergman's 'old way' and Antonioni's 'old way' are quite different. Though they are not the new way of great bores like Tsai Ming-Liang or Sokorov.
When we say 'old' we are of course also talking about the 'old world', of the Fifties and Sixties when in Europe things were still very different, strange, quaint, and cinema of that time captured things, streetscapes, landscapes, ways of being lost to us now. 1957 was a very long time ago. 50 years ago. A man the age of Death when 'Seventh Seal' was made would have probably died of old age in 1982. Death certainly wouldn't be alive now. But the time when Death was alive and well and living on a beach in Sweden is preserved, conserved for us by the cinema of Bergman which is in turn conserved, at least for now, by the lovers of 'old' cinema.
What makes the 'old ways' fascinating and magical to us now is of course the era in which they were shot, the stock on which the films were made, the world they bring back to life for us. Now we must travel further to find the same oddness, to Kazakhstan or Kurdistan (Bhaman Ghobadi in 'Half Moon', Volker Schlondorff in 'Ulzhan') or to Turkey where old and new exist side by side. Nuri Bilge Ceylan has a character in 'Uzak' worry that photography may have been entirely superceded by cinema and now be a dead art. But cinema too is dead very soon after it is made. But our cinephilia is an absorbing fascination with the dead and how they live.

Woman In The Window, The (1944)

Edward G Robinson as Professor Richard Wanley bids farewell to his wife and two children at the railway station - his life is in order, everything is fine - until he sees the portrait in the window next door to his club of a modestly beautiful young woman, heavily framed in gilt. Frame within a frame within a frame. And then, on the surface of the glass, he sees the face of the same woman reflected, only more ghostly. It is the face of Joan Bennett, as Alice Reed, who is flattered to find she has an admirer. Perhaps it is the older man's evident besottedness at her portrait which charms her to invite him out for a drink.

Women who chat men up and ask them out for a drink, I've always had a soft spot for them. And then she buys him another, and another, and despite his clubmen friends' warning not to make a fool of himself with younger women now that he has passed forty, Wanley goes back to her apartment where he settles down to enjoy another cocktail. Suddenly in bursts another gentleman caller, irate Claude Mazard (Arthur Loft), incensed to discover that his mistress is entertaining at this very late hour another admirer.

His temper gets the better of him: he pins Edward G to the couch, his hands around his neck, and seems intent on strangling him, when Joan Bennett's Alice Reed hands him the scissors, and before you can say "Fritz Lang!" the job is done and Claude is a dead man.

The couple then must figure out how to dispose of the body without leaving evidence for the investigators, not yet realising who the victim is a well-known, wealthy corporate tycoon, and that he has a bodyguard following him everywhere.

Professor Wanley's drinking buddy just happens to be the D.A. (Raymond Massey) and talks him through the investigation process, which takes place at a lick, almost turning Edward G's hair white. And the couple's attempts to get the better of the situation don't go too well.

The plot veers towards classic film noir: Joan Bennett is the femme and if the film followed through to its logical end then Edward G would be fatale, but for reasons that may have been due to its late-wartime period, then movie does not end in disaster (like DOA, Double Indemnity, Gun Crazy, Detour). But the charm of the piece is in the pacing, the graceful movement towards and away from the original murder, the elegance of Edward G Robinson's character under stress, the simple plain-beauty of Joan Bennett's Alice, the nobility of the original conceit: to fall in love with a work of art, to fall in love with the woman in the work of art, to behave heroically when placed in crisis by that love, all this your average passionate moviegoer can find it in his heart to admire. This must be Fritz Lang's most likeable film.