TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI (Jacques Becker, 1953)

Jean Gabin (best actor, Venice) is superb as Max, an aging gangster in the Montmartre district of Paris, who has convinced himself, at least, that he wishes to retire, in Jacques Becker’s razor-sharp, electrifying, ultimately wistful film noir of gangland warfare, Touchez pas au grisbi (Hands Off the Loot!). Gabin’s final touch of secret gaiety in his complex role may owe something to the Mona Lisa-personality of Marlene Dietrich, with whom Gabin recently was involved romantically.
     Becker’s mise-en-scène dazzles with its intricate, dynamic activity. Contesting, moderating the film’s intense realism is a dimension of theatricality and artifice nudged in by the opening of doors and windows, including interior windows on interior activity, that transform scenes observed by characters in the film as though they were playlets, emphasizing the degree to which these characters live well-rehearsed lives founded in well-rehearsed rituals. Hallways with progressive arches perform a similar function.
     Max and pal Henri, nicknamed Riton, have made what they hoped would be their final heist: gold bars worth fifty million francs. But when the boss of another gang kidnaps Riton, will Max exchange the loot for Riton? Ultimately, no one gets the loot, and either Max or Riton loses his life. The fateful outcome follows something else that changes hands: Josy (Jeanne Moreau, strikingly young), once Riton’s property, now the possession of the rival gang boss, ironically named Angelo.
     The shoot-out between gangs on a road in the dark of night may be the most thrilling passage in Becker’s œuvre. The headlights of cars illuminate the determinism that these gangsters have interiorized; when the “good guys” subject a rival gang member to torture, the Resistance comes rushing back.
     These men battle phantoms of historic memory, and the soul of France hangs in the balance.

MY LEFT FOOT (Jim Sheridan, 1989)

The first part of a loose trilogy of films co-written and directed by Dublin-born Jim Sheridan, all of them starring Daniel Day-Lewis (who somewhere along the way dropped the hyphen), My Left Foot finds the actor portraying the actual tormented soul Christy Brown (1932-1981), who struggled to paint and write. Born with severe cerebral palsy to a poor family in Dublin, spastic, alcoholic, enraged at his limitations, including lack of control over his body, and enraged at the various responses these attributes drew from others, Brown had no choice but to work with the only limb of his that would work: his left foot.
     The film, from Ireland and the UK, is based on Brown’s memoir. Sheridan and Day-Lewis aim to make accessible how Brown felt on a daily basis, what he was persistently up against. Emotionally, this film “goes for broke” like few others do. In so doing, it gave Day-Lewis both the structure and detail of his subsequent stardom and career: his celebrated pushing himself to the limit. Day-Lewis won a plethora of acting awards for his Christy Brown, including the Oscar.
     This ferociously embittered individual can never be right with the world. Brown, as Day-Lewis portrays him, far from being a freak, is an Everyman in extremis, but one whose challenges necessarily blind him to his kinship with others. Day-Lewis’s Christy assaults the same inhospitable world that unmans, more quietly, less outrageously, others of and among us. Day-Lewis helps us to feel our kinship with Christy Brown.
     Day-Lewis is the son of Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, who also was Oscared—for his contribution to the 1938 adaptation of Shaw’s Pygmalion that Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard directed. He is probably the single most gifted male actor working today in English-language films.

35 SHOTS OF RUM (Claire Denis, 2008)

“Don’t feel I need looking after,” Lionel tells daughter Joséphine, but he does need this and might never be prepared to set her free, although he knows he must accept that Jo will set herself free, and soon. Since the death of his wife, Jo’s German mother, Lionel and Jo have developed a life together of unusually tender intimacy betwixt father-and-daughter and their being some sort of couple. (We see Lionel’s jealousy when Jo dances at a café with someone else.) Lionel is a train conductor; the film’s overture consists of many passing trains: transience; things “moving on.”
     35 rhums, one of her greatest works, is Claire Denis’s hommage to Yasujiro Ozu, especially Late Spring (1949), where a father presses for his daughter’s leaving him for marriage when all she wants to do is stay on the same track in life and take care of him. Sometimes, the gentle pace and rhythms of Denis’s elliptical film suggest not only Ozu but Hou Hsiao-hsien’s hommage to Ozu, Café Lumière (2003). But train’s-eye views-in-motion insinuate also Jean Renoir’s La bête humaine (1938), from Zola. There is no murder in Denis’s film—unless we count the suicide of René, Lionel’s co-worker who cannot cope with forced retirement and has Lionel unknowingly run him over and find his body, perhaps as a reproach.
     “Moving on”: Lionel is a black African immigrant; France itself has had to leave its African colonies; neighbor Gabrielle and Lionel no longer are romantically involved. Noé (Grégoire Colin, brilliant), another neighbor in their low-district apartment building in the outskirts of Paris, desires Jo. (All four: “a family,” Gabrielle at one point says.) Since the deaths of his parents, Noé has been a shattered soul; when his cat dies, he still can’t move on.