In Robert Bresson’s first color film, Une femme douce, based on Dostoievski’s story “Krotkaya,” Luc loses his beautiful young wife (Dominique Sanda, brilliant), who drops from their bourgeois balcony to the classless street. Indulging his complacency, Luc impresses Anna, the maid, into listening to his half-hearted flashbacking attempt to piece together the puzzle of the […]
Monthly Archives: March 2008
Today I began watching belatedly for the first time Billy Rose’s Jumbo with this thought: This is the sort of film that my father would have (or must have) liked; but I won’t. But I do. The much rewritten 1935 Broadway musical—the original book was by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, no less—has been transformed […]
Robert Altman, one of the best American filmmakers of the past forty years, had his share of misses, perhaps the most unendurable of which is the frigid, futuristic Quintet (1977). For a quarter-century there have been those who have wanted to relegate the teen comedy O.C. and Stiggs to this ignominious group. These must be […]
A film composed almost entirely of fleeting and sometimes esoteric sensations, Shunji Iwai’s Riri Shushu no subete aims nonetheless at a complex portrait of contemporary young Japanese teenagers. The superficiality of the film is, one supposes, correlative to the superficial lives, thoughts and feelings of these children. Iwai’s rough, perpetually near-epileptic use of handheld camera […]
Old devil hate, I knew you long ago, Before I learned the poison in your breath Now when I hear your lies my lovers gather round And help me rise to fight you one more time . . . — Pete Seeger, “Old Devil Time” Otto Preminger’s Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon, […]
Dennis Grunes 