THE BRIDESMAID (Claude Chabrol, 2004)

Claude Chabrol’s dark, turbulent La demoiselle d’honneur, adapted by Chabrol and Pierre Leccia from the novel by Ruth Rendell, seems especially lame coming in between his Flower of Evil (2003) and The Comedy of Power (2006), both excellent. It’s a charmless variation on Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951).
     Philippe Tardieu is stuck on a stone-cold woman: Flora, the bust that his late father gave his mother, which adorns their back yard on a pedestal. When the widow, with the permission of her three children, gives the head away to Gérard, her current beau, Philippe steals it back and hides it in his room, every now and then uncloseting it for on-the-mouth kisses and a sleep-together. At his sister’s wedding, the boy meets bridesmaid Stéphanie, who calls herself Senta and who reminds him of Flora. They fall in love. However, Senta, it turns out, is at least as perverse as Philippe, whom she asks to prove his love for her by murdering a stranger. When he takes advantage of a nearby killing by telling Senta he did it, she reciprocates. Her murder is for real, though, and it’s not her first.
     Benoît Magimel plays Philippe, and his inept acting robs the moody proceedings of all credibility. The central issue is that Philippe, who is careful, hardworking, even fastidious, throws caution to the winds for the sake of this girl. However, Magimel’s performance finds Philippe plunging himself into Senta’s crazy world without the requisite complexity or ambiguity; he’s a pushover for passion. The transitions—such as Philippe’s decision to boast of murder—burst out of the blue.
     There are always sly touches in a Chabrol film. But these are not enough to achieve a reasonable result when Magimel renders the core matter thin and arbitrary.

LA JETEE (Chris Marker, 1962)

With affinities for Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Robbe-Grillet and Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and Godard’s upcoming Alphaville (1965), Chris Marker’s black-and-white “photographic novel,” La jetée, explores “the paradoxes of time.”
     On the pier at Orly, a boy espies a woman with a winsome smile. If he were grown, they might fall in love.
     Marker’s film consists of stills and solemn voiceover. Paris, razed in World War III, is “rotten with radioactivity”; in subterranean passageways, “the victors stood guard over a kingdom of rats,” submitting prisoners to mind-experiments calling up past and future “to rescue the present.” One of these prisoners is the grown version of the boy at the beginning. Attached to the image of the woman he saw on the pier, he is sent into the past, where he, as he is now, and the woman do become lovers; but the man realizes that the woman was killed in the war. Having her is a kind of perpetual loss. Moreover, his captors yank him out of this past to send him to the future, where he discovers that Paris has been rebuilt. Narrator: “Since humanity had survived, it could not refuse to its own past the means to its own survival.” The future accepts him, but the man opts to return to the past, hoping that his beloved will be waiting for him. There she is; he runs toward her—an event shown in an agitated montage resembling freeze frames. At the film’s beginning, on the pier, was a dead body. Alas, the man now knows this was he. “There is no way out of time.”
     Earlier, a series of dissolves of his sleeping beloved culminated in the film’s one spot of motion: her eyes opening. Now the dreamer’s eyes are forever shut.

SUNLESS (Chris Marker, 1982)

Taking its title from an 1874 cycle of Mussorgsky songs, Chris Marker’s Sans soleil bounds over four continents in its anthropological, philosophical travelogue combining documentary materials. Marker interrelates numerous issues, including space, time, memory, history, computers, street festivals and commemorations, appearance versus reality, such as in a public ceremony that projects political unity when in fact contrary feelings, suppressed from view, will eventually erupt into a violent change of leadership. Filmmaker and friend Jean-Pierre Gorin has called the film “a grand map of how the imaginary functions,” and summarizes its theme as “what it means to be human” in our time.
     Different things fascinate Marker’s eye: Japanese girls, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), happiness and unhappiness, cats (real and sculpted ones of all kinds), eyes. “We do not remember,” Marker suggests. “We rewrite memory, much as history is rewritten.” Moreover, Hayao Yamaneko contributes special effects that digitize filmed images, distorting their appearance—or, do I mean, distorting their reality? Or, showing the truth?
     This is indeed a film that variously, and intriguingly, plays with its materials. (Remembering, we are told, is not the opposite of forgetting but, rather, its lining.) The film opens and closes with an image of three children, walking on an Iceland road, that supposedly crystallizes happiness; but the black blank screen with which the image is occasionally interrupted leaves us uncertain as to what the “meaning” is. The entire film is structured as a series of letters read aloud by their recipient; the fictitious author, Sandor Krasna, has shot the images that the disembodied voiceover conjures for us in her recitations. We are at a tourist’s remove from what we see; yet any moment we may become a part of what is visible, seduced by what Lévi-Strauss calls “the poignancy of things.”

GOAL DREAMS (Maya Sanbar, Jeffrey Saunders, 2006)

Rejecting partition as set forth by the United Nations at the inception of the modern state of Israel, and rebuffing every Israeli offer of peaceful co-existence since (1967, 1973, 1998, 2000), Palestinians are without a place to call home. This circumstance claims collateral damage. It may seem among the least of their woes that Palestinians thus have no home base for an internationally competing sports team. When it came to the world’s most popular sport (what a few call soccer), however, Palestinians had to find a way. Proceeding on the basis of nationality rather than nation, a Palestinian National Football Team was created, its players culled from many countries, including Syria, Egypt, Chile, the United States. The documentary Goal Dreams follows the motley team as they prepare for a decisive qualification match (against Uzbekistan) for the 2006 World Cup competition. It is a poignant film, not least of all because it’s haunted by the possibility of a nation that Palestinians, misled by leaders intoxicated by their own power and by contagious irrational hatred, have all but abdicated.
     The head coach speaks in English that’s translated into Arabic and Spanish. The U.S. team member, who grew up wholly accepted in a Jewish community (every one of his friends was Jewish), remarks with a chuckle how rarely, apparently, the translations are accurate! He loves America; he loves Palestine. His pride in wearing a jersey that says “Palestine” is irresistible—dignified, vulnerable, Quixotic. He is one of four players on whom the film focuses.
     A “sports film,” after all, Goal Dreams relaxes into some pleasantly formulaic stuff; but the condition of Palestinian nationlessness deepens the material.
     ”Wherever our national team goes,” a sponsor says, “our hearts run after.”
     Co-director Maya Sanbar’s heritage is Palestinian and Lebanese.

IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE (Frank Capra, 1946)

It’s grandiose. It sets its inflated style with its opening voice-overed starry heaven, and continues this style during its (interminable) duration on earth. By contrast, Lothar Mendes’s one decade-earlier The Man Who Could Work Miracles, from Wells, begins the same way but becomes precise, life-sized, once the action comes down to our planet. The Mendes film is also a lot funnier.
     Capra’s theme—how an ordinary man’s life matters, because it touches so many other lives—is sound; but here it doubly disintegrates. One, Capra’s grandiose style cannot accommodate the small spectacle of an ordinary man. Two, his Everyman, George Bailey, is given a history that matches the grandiosity of the style! As a kid, Bailey not only saved his brother’s life at risk to his own but saved his employer, a dipsomaniacal pharmacist, from prison! The film proceeds along these inflated lines. Bailey’s life may be wonderful, but it’s hardly ordinary.
     James Stewart gives a good (though by no means great) performance, and Beulah Bondi is fine as Bailey’s mom. But too many of the other performances are way over the top. Henry Travers barely registers as Clarence, the budding angel. Cute: that’s all Travers does here. Donna Reed, as usual, is insufferable.
     Not one of the children is the least bit engaging, let alone memorable.
     Capra films have been noisy before; but this one splits the eardrums—and for no other purpose than to pursue its “big” aims. Capra is thinking, I suppose, the louder, the better.
     All the cribbing from A Christmas Carol made me wish I were watching Brian Desmond Hurst’s Scrooge (1951) instead. I don’t give a dickens for It’s a Wonderful Life. If you say you do, I won’t believe you—any more than I can believe that anyone could be so misguided as to think that The Godfather (1972) is a good movie.