“Why didn’t you let me drown?” — Boudu Michel Simon is hilariously anarchic as a homeless tramp—this may be his greatest role—in Jean Renoir’s satire of bourgeois Parisians, Boudu sauvé des eaux, from the play by René Fauchois. Boudu is taken into the home of a conscientious bookseller who has rescued him after he tries […]
Daily Archives: August 17, 2008
A sequel of sorts to Le fond de l’air est rouge (1977), Chats perchés finds Chris Marker, the world’s most celebrated lover of cat-images, in a frisky, playful and, now that he is in his eighties, elegiac mood. In 2001, all around his Paris, on this building and that, close to the ground or high […]
In turning down the role of Sister Luke in The Nun’s Story, Ingrid Bergman suggested Audrey Hepburn instead; the charming comedienne and elfin Givenchy clotheshorse managed a sober, restrained, intelligent performance as the Belgian nun. But this is both a trivial film and a noxious one—trivial, because it is a glossy, superficial entertainment, not a […]
Principally about her mother and herself as a child, and their close relationship, during the Second World War while their husband and father fought at the Eastern front, writer-director Helma Sanders-Brahms’s Deutschland bleiche Mutter is so sharply distinctive that it affects the viewer in a fresh way. It is definitely a very odd, very touching […]
Dennis Grunes 