Shortly after completing “La petite marchande d’allumettes,” based on the tale by Hans Christian Andersen, Jean Renoir and Catherine Hessling divorced, making it the last film where Renoir directed Hessling. Here, the usually deficient Hessling charms, the whole film enchants, and Renoir achieves poignancy that is wedded to incomparable visual beauty. Karen, who is starving, […]
Monthly Archives: February 2011
Claude Chabrol is one of the five greatest French filmmakers of all time. (The other four, alphabetically, are Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Renoir, Alain Resnais.) Along with Godard, he was the most prolific. Chabrol died last year, making Inspector Bellamy—originally, Bellamy—his final film. This masterpiece contains one of cinema’s most piercing utterances. (Chabrol and […]
A fan of her first feature, Red Road (2006), I have looked forward to seeing British writer-director Andrea Arnold’s follow-up, which like its predecessor took the Jury prize at Cannes. (I have yet to see her short film “Wasp,” for which Arnold previously won an Oscar.) In addition, Fish Tank—for that is what the film […]
The first film that Jean Renoir solo-directed is a slight, intermittently lovely thing that accomplishes two tasks: it occasions a flexing of all manner of cinematic technique while showcasing its star, Renoir’s wife at the time, Catherine Hessling, in the lead role. Written as an implausible rural melodrama by Pierre Lestringuez, La fille de l’eau—literally, […]
At first it might seem that the isolated, contemporary Greek family portrayed in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kynodontas constitutes a world unto themselves. The mother is a stay-at-home, and the three kids, a boy in his late teens or early twenties and his two younger sisters, are being home-schooled—although not very accurately, since they learn, for example, […]
Dennis Grunes 