The same year as the enormously expensive, spectacular War and Peace (Sergei Bondarchuk, 1967), another war film emerged from the U.S.S.R.—this one, modest, in black and white, and twenty times better. Gleb Panfilov’s V ogne broda net is a tremendous achievement. In 1917 civil war-torn Russia, as the Revolution approaches, young Tanya, a peasant, works […]
Category Archives: Formal Capsule Film Comments
Writer-director Alain Robbe-Grillet’s L’homme qui ment—essential viewing, this—begins in a wooded expanse as a youngish man, nicely dressed, pursued by armed soldiers, ducks behind trees to avoid their bullets and, despite the cascades of bullets aimed at him, escapes uninjured: a fantastical (and visually gorgeous) opening that visually translates this man’s propensity for telling whoppers. […]
Dazzlingly made by Emir Kusturíca (best director, Cannes), Dom za vešanje (which is in Serbian)—literally, Home for Hanging—is a gripping, engrossing Yugoslavian melodrama about Perhan, who descends into petty crime to pay for his crippled sister’s hospital care and for the house he wants built for himself and his grandmother. It is also a colorful, […]
A co-production of France and Canada, Blood Relatives (Les liens de sang) is set in Montreal. Adapted from an Ed McBain novel by Claude Chabrol and Sydney Banks, the plot involves a brutal murder crossing two overlapping circles of family incest. Chabrol directed. The opening on a rain-soaked street at night, mysteriously, hauntingly in black […]
The Germans have already invaded France. In the winter of 1941, in a village in the Jura Mountains, the Loue River divides Free France and Occupied France. The bleak grayness of Jean Rabier’s immaculate black-and-white cinematography in writer-director Claude Chabrol’s La ligne de démarcation expresses the sadness of the French people, and the defeatism of […]
Dennis Grunes 