Detailing a way of life that has passed from Earth, and capturing the rhythm of that life, Le cheval d’orgueil is based on Pierre-Jakez Hélias’s autobiographical novel. Claude Chabrol’s beautiful film depicts an impoverished, tight-knit, deeply religious Breton village in the years 1908-1918. A representative of Hélias as an old reminiscing soul narrates. Since the […]
Monthly Archives: September 2011
Adam (Youssouf Djaoro, so-so, despite acting prizes), the fiftysomething protagonist of Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Un homme qui crie, is dignified, composed, quiet; the title refers to his suppressed turbulence, his inner Munch. In N’Djamena, he is the pool attendant at a prestigious hotel; the former champion swimmer is proud he was the first person to have […]
Combining amiable slapstick and atmosphere, Buster Keaton’s comical western, Go West, follows Friendless, Keaton’s character, as he hops trains both east and west, leaving his small town in Indiana, in hopes of finding a job. The earnest youth suffers from low “social standing,” which taxes employment prospects in the Land of Opportunity. The cut from […]
Superior to Akira Kurosawa’s Hamlet film, Warui Yatsu Hodo Yoku Nemuru (The Bad Sleep Well, 1960), Helmut Käutner’s Der Rest ist Schweigen, from West Germany, was first to move Shakespeare’s play up to the present and out of a royal court and into the world of business. John H. Claudius—note the middle initial— returns home […]
A crowd-pleasing piece of tripe, less from Chad than from France, Abouna is an African film by way of fabricated myth. Two brothers, 15-year-old Tahir and 8-year-old Amine, search for their father, who, their mother discovers one day, has abandoned them. Now the lost mother bears some ancient resonance; the lost brother, Romantic resonance. But […]
Dennis Grunes 