STOLEN KISSES (François Truffaut, 1968)

The third of the five films in François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel cycle, Baisers volés picks up on Antoine, now in his early twenties, as he is let out of the brig (for going AWOL repeatedly) and kicked out of the service. His first stop of freedom: a brothel—not just for the sex but also to confirm his tool hasn’t lost its touch.
     Antoine’s heart is fixed on Christine Darbon; can he move her heart towards him? In the meantime, in any case, Antoine needs to find himself so that there is a “him.” Night watchman, detective, shoe salesman (an undercover detective job—a job-within-a-job), TV repairman: Antoine doesn’t keep a job for long. As with the military, he keeps getting discharged.
     The shoestore boss’s wife (Delphine Seyrig, delicious) occasions a moment of extreme adolescent panic: he calls her “sir” and flees; but she tracks him down to his apartment, and they make love. Her husband had hired the detective agency for which Antoine works in order to get to the bottom of why no one likes him; but, really or unconsciously or both, Monsieur Tabard wonders about this where his wife is concerned.
     And now someone is shadowing Christine and Antoine because he wishes to declare his love for Christine.
     Everything that happens in this hilarious, warm film conspires in and contributes to getting Antoine and Christine together as a couple. The universe is on their side. “Their song,” that is to say, Truffaut’s song expressing his hope for them is what we know in English as Charles Trenet’s “I Wish You Love.”
     Truffaut has dedicated this film to Henri Langlois, that year the ousted and reinstated force behind the Cinémathèque, which he co-founded. More love.
     Jean-Pierre Léaud is again brilliant as Antoine Doinel.

JULES AND JIM (François Truffaut, 1961)

Please see paragraph #11 of my piece on Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black, filed under “film reviews.”

GERVAISE (René Clément, 1956)

From Émile Zola’s novel L’Assomoir, Gervaise takes place in a nineteenth-century Parisian working-class neighborhood. Their gray, dilapidated, circumscribed existence makes inhabitants accomplices to one another’s dreams, but also the jealous inhibitors and ambushers of these dreams. Disappointments deepen capacities to behave recklessly against oneself and others. Environment feeds disappointments, which in turn tighten the environment’s grip on people’s lives. Even when individuals seem most at the mercy of their foibles and failings, social environment is most decisive in determining behavior, however elusively.
     Gervaise is a washerwoman whose lameness manifests as personal affliction this gripping environment. Her pride in her “handsome” lover, Lantier, overcompensates for her affliction and the restricted nature of her dream, to own her own laundry shop, which she pursues after Lantier abandons her and their two small sons. By this time she has married Henri Coupeau, a roofer whose drop one day to the pavement below breaks his spirit as well as a leg. Too proud to admit, post-recovery, his residual fear, that is to say, vulnerability, he drinks heavily and ends up stealing from Gervaise and demolishing her shop in an alcoholic rage. The closing shot is scaldingly ironic: Nana, their little daughter, seemingly carefree, heads into the neighborhood streets. Some say her future has been determined by her parents’ past. It is more accurate to say that her future has been determined by the same environment that determined her parents’ future.
     René Clément has not made a “period film” per se; rather, inspired by Zola’s naturalism and cinema’s neorealism, he has made a fluent film that makes the past seem as though it were unfolding in the present. This is an exceptionally vivid, detailed film. Even so, its principal asset is Maria Schell’s complex, devastating performance (best actress, Venice) as Gervaise.

HEROD’S LAW (Luis Estrada, 1999)

The following is one of the entries from my list of the 100 greatest films (through 2006) from Africa, Latin America & the Caribbean, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Herod’s Law: Fuck people over before they fuck with you.
     Luis Estrada’s brutal, brilliant film satirizes the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)’s stranglehold on Mexico’s politics and Mexican lives since the Revolution. The government succeeded in suppressing the film until adverse publicity compelled its release. The following year, the opposition candidate (National Action Party), former Coca-Cola manager Vicente Fox, was elected president.
     Mild-mannered, naive Juan Vargas, a junkyard custodian, becomes mayor of a tiny rural patch, San Pedro de los Saguaros, whose non-Spanish-speaking indigenes have already lynched a number of his predecessors. Vargas begins idealistically and compassionately, intending to bring social justice and erase poverty, but the Party official appointing him, instead of allocating funds (which are being monopolized by the expense of the upcoming election), arms Juan with a giant book of federal and state laws, to squeeze fees and taxes out of the poor, and a gun, to buttress his authority. When the madam of the local brothel resists his attempt to extort money from her, he shoots her and her bodyguard dead and moves to frame a doctor who has threatened to have him removed from office. It is in this vein that Estrada’s film continues, frequently hilariously. Vargas ends up becoming a wife-beater, killing his mentor and publicly announcing the Party’s determination to stay in power forever: business as usual.
     Some have complained about the film’s broadness and bluntness; farcical satire isn’t the worse for being unsubtle, unShavian.
     The accumulation of plot twists and turns suggests the depth of political corruption and social inattention during so many decades of entrenched PRI rule. Estrada overlooks little; for instance, La ley de Herodes is withering on the subject of the contribution made by Mexico’s gringo northern neighbor to the host of woes routinely visited on Mexico’s poor.

MUNDO GRÚA (Pablo Trapero, 1999)

The following is one of the entries from my list of the 100 greatest films (through 2006) from Africa, Latin America & the Caribbean, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

In Argentina, the disparity between rich and poor is deepened by a global economy that impoverishes much of the middle-class and sacrifices the poor to enhance the wealth of transnational corporations. This new eco-colonialism contextualizes Pablo Trapero’s black-and-white Mundo grúa (Crane World).
     Divorced, in his forties, Rulo (Luis Margani, wonderful) does odd jobs in Buenos Aires such as selling tires and fixing trucks. Torres, a friend, gets him a job in construction operating a crane. The day that Rulo is to start work, however, he is let go in favor of a younger man, ostensibly because Rulo smokes and is fifty pounds overweight. But one wonders; in what may be a flashforward, the film opens with Torres, who is slim and fit, being fired from his construction job for not being “dressed right.” Intrusive impersonal forces, rationalized by “rules,” apparently determine employment. After Rulo is fired, shots of dormant equipment project his banishment from the work site.
     Torres secures Rulo another crane job, as an excavator in Patagonia, in the southern desert. This means leaving behind friends, mother, teenaged son Claudio, and girlfriend Adriana, whose once profitable sandwich kiosk struggles against a backdrop of prodigious construction.
     Fellow workers provide the only companionship in Rulo’s new environment. When one day food that the “bosses” are supposed to provide doesn’t arrive, in a spontaneous show of solidarity the workers refuse to work until it does. Later, their pay stops. Is the company that was bankrolling the construction pulling out? Everyone’s job evaporates. This time, static shots of abandoned equipment occupy a wasteland of vast sky and of sand composed of volcanic white shells. Each worker heads back to wherever he came from. Makeshift lives; transience.
     Trapero: “I wanted a film that was like a hidden camera filming snatches of reality.”