Ingrid Bergman is a miracle of sensitivity, giving a luminous performance, in Roberto Rossellini’s Giovanna d’Arco al rogo. (Actually, I saw the French-language version, Jeanne au bûcher, but with Bergman’s irreplaceable voice, not Claude Nollier’s.) How can Bergman be brilliant here when she was dreadful in Joan of Arc (Victor Fleming, 1948)? Answer: Rossellini. Like […]
Monthly Archives: August 2008
I have added the following entry to my 100 Greatest Asian Films list. Recurrent civil war since 1983 in Sri Lanka has had a devastating effect on the land and its people. Writer-director Vimukthi Jayasundara was both rewarded and censured for his Kiarostaminian Sulanga Enu Pinisa, winning the Caméra d’Or (for best first feature) at […]
Writer-director Jacques Doillon, who is the father of three girls, to his everlasting disgrace made Ponette, a pornographic exploitation of a four-year-old’s coping with the death (by road accident) of her mother. It’s a piece of “sensitive” trash. Preposterously, Victoire Thivisol won best actress at Venice; the child does nothing but react as she has […]
What, if anything, does Aleksandr Sokurov’s Krug vtoroy have to do with Dante’s second circle of Hell, to which those who lusted, such as Francesca and her brother-in-law, are consigned? Regardless, the film is visually transparent, with its color repressed almost to the point of monochrome. This is, after all, a film in which a […]
Poverty, and fresh love’s capacity to undo its grip of despair, at least temporarily: in adapting Maxim Gorky’s play Na dnie for the French screen, Jean Renoir takes on a great theme. On this occasion Renoir’s primary interest lies elsewhere than in social analysis, the crux of Gorky’s concern. However uneven the result, Les bas-fonds […]
Dennis Grunes 