Based on an actual crime dossier, Jean Renoir’s Toni realistically depicts ordinary lives, thus departing from the theatrical or lyrically impressionistic styles that had dominated French cinema. Renoir filmed on location in Martigues, a village in southern France, blending local residents and professional actors and directly recording sound. Immigrants from Italy and Spain have come […]
Daily Archives: March 10, 2007
Crisp and exuberant, full of youthful iconoclasm, stingingly ironical, Jean Vigo’s documentary A propos de Nice satirizes the resort crowd on the French Riviera. Its restless camera, both in terms of movement and the rapid-change variety of camera angles and positions that Vigo devises with the assistance of cinematographer Boris Kaufman (Dziga Vertov’s brother), conjoins […]
“Do you love me?” This question involving friends Marcus and Paul encapsulates contemporary egotism and self-doubt. Marcus must ask this of his partner, who may have initiated their love affair but who is now exhausted by her lover’s need for reassurance, which losing his job has only deepened. On the other hand, Paul receives the […]
I have written before about the inadequacy of nearly every American film in the war genre. This is bizarre, in one respect, because the subject of war has inspired many of the world’s most trenchant films. Hollywood’s ineptitude at making war films, however, makes perfect sense when one considers the reluctance of the U.S. to […]
The crisis for a man of turning forty: this is the theme of the fifth in Eric Rohmer’s series of ‘moral tales,’ Claire’s Knee (Le genou de Claire), an elegant, ironic comedy. Rohmer, who both wrote and directed, had himself just turned fifty—a similar, even more painful milestone. (I know.) Jérôme—Jean-Claude Brialy, in perhaps his […]
Dennis Grunes 