Posted on: December 8, 2009
A Christmas Tale. Directed by Arnaud Desplechin. 2008
“A Christmas Tale” is a strange piece of movie-making, but quite effective for all of that. It turns many conventions on their heads, and does so both with a naturalistic flare and innovative camera work. It is the story of an unruly, dysfunctional family, their squabbles and their secrets, with few, if any, resolutions. It’s not your typical holiday movie. It’s not even a typical holiday movie sending up other holiday movies. It seems without genre, though the director, Arnaud Desplechin, samples from other movies like “Funny Face”, “The Ten Commandments”, and Max Reinhardt’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. He sometimes points his actors at the audience to give soliloquies as well, borrowing yet again from Shakespeare.…
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Posted on: October 28, 2008
The Flight of the Red Balloon
Just watched Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s wonderful film, The Flight of the Red Balloon. Set in a glowing, shadowy, geometric and abstract Paris, it stars Juliette Binoche as Suzanne, and Simon Iteanu as her son Simon. Simon’s nanny, a young film student from China, is played by Song Fang. I’m not sure who plays the red flotation device.
The film is a homage to Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 classic, The Red Balloon, but doubles and echoes and adds new layers. The nanny shoots film footage in Paris, incorporating her new charge, Simon, and his hovering red friend and we see both the internal and the external. We watch the film within the film and think about what that hovering balloon may be pointing to.…
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Posted on: September 16, 2008
Woody Allen’s new film takes a sharp turn. It’s a departure from most of his other films in that neuroses is foreign, literally foreign, and perhaps more understandable in that context. The most overtly neurotic character, Maria Elena, played by Penelope Cruz, is the violently passionate ex-wife of the artist Juan Antonio, played by Javier Bardem. The two main characters, Vicky and Cristina, played by Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johansson, are mildly conflicted in comparison. The two American tourists, spending their summer in Spain, seem quite “normal” in comparison to the hot-blooded Spanish duo who can’t live with or without each other. And that contrast between the American version of normality and the Spanish version of living for the moment, a sort of tremendismo for artists, a ménage à trois for the Picasso in all of us, is the heart of the movie.…
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