Triplets of Belleville (France/Canada/Belgium, 2003, Sylvain Chomet) AKA Tati-rific

The almost entirely dialogue-free film takes place in some vaguely post-Second World War trans-Atlantic urban setting, with an appropriately retro look and great scat-jazzy-blues music to keep us hopping throughout. Madame Souza, who is in nearly every scene, centres the film. Along with her grandson, she shares a humble house that literally leans over the train tracks. Running her home like a finely-oiled machine--even the dog knows exactly when he must charge to the top of the stairst to bark at the passing trains--Madame Souza is obviously deeply devoted to her grandson. Indeed, in washed-out looking, rather bleak-looking scenes, she throws everything she has behind his dream of riding in the Tour de France. When the scene shifts to Gaul, the colour palette becomes vibrant, as the dream has become a reality. However, when he is kidnapped by some block-shouldered villains for their nefarious purposes, Madame Souza won’t let a few minor details, like repairing a flat tire with chewing gum and a gullible but elephantine pet dog Bruno, or crossing the ocean on a paddle boat, get in her way.

Still, it’s not the what of the plot, but the how of the storytelling that is key to our enjoyment of the film. Going to The Triplets of Belleville for the plot is like going to Scotland for the weather. Listening to Dylan for the acrobatic vocals. Going to Michael Jackson for plastic surgery tips. Watching a Kevin Smith movie for the visual panache. Eating Twinkies for their nutritional value. Going to a Jacques Tati movie (something that writer/director Sylvain Chomet has obviously done a few times) for the dialogue. Triplet’s world is, to put it mildly, distinctive; nay, let me suggest that it is unique—I certainly haven’t been anyplace like this before inside a movie theatre—and it reminded me of my first experiences with great animators Miyazaki and Nick Park. Not that their visual styles are similar in any way, but rather because they share this ability to magically mix the familiar with the exotic.

Chomet has filled this film with figures whose characteristics are gross caricatures of each individual’s most prevalent features. For instance, the cyclists are grotesque ectomorphs from the waste up, and hideous mesomorphs from the thighs down. Chomet has also created characters so rigorously committed to the truths of their lives, that we cannot help but get swept up in them and bemoan their difficulties or cheer their every success. This is also a movie with a wicked and sly sense of humour, and rarely will a scene slip by that doesn’t elicit a grin, chuckle or belly laugh out of the audience. Luckily, this is also one of those most wonderful of films that you can’t ruin for others simply by talking about it. Words cannot replicate the world that Chomet has designed here; description is pointless, as Belleville simply must be experienced firsthand. The most a poor scribe like me can hope to do is whip up enough enthusiasm with my words to drive you to the nearest cineplex. Get thee to a theatre!

Score: 87/100

All righty, before getting on w/ the review du jour, here are some links to reviews that I mentioned I was working on:

Beauty and the Beast

Drole de drame

Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne


Oh, and for good measure, my review of Antonioni's great Blow Up

Now, onto today's main course. For those of you who prefer your Christ allegories to be more subtle, affecting and intelligent than a Fistful of Nails, I offer you this:

Diary of a Country Priest (France, 1951, Robert Bresson) AKA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Saint

Robert Bresson’s Christ allegory is surprisingly powerful, considering my first impressions of the titular country priest (Claude Laydu) were not particularly positive. The thin and wan young man is so clearly ill-fitted to his first parish in the small French town of Ambricourt, with a demeanor so meek and a bearing so painfully humble, you could be excused for wondering why he hadn’t signed up at the nearest monastery instead. Compounding the priest’s difficulties is the daily reminder of the townspeople’s narrow-minded provincialism, their sometimes active hostility towards this outsider in their midst and his discovery that he simply cannot engage with these people. He just does not get them, which does not auger well for his first assignment.

Bresson borrows a little bit of Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc in the lighting and angles he uses to capture the priest, emphasizing his martyrdom at the hands of these vindictive, petty people. Laydu, while no Falconetti, has an innate aspect of suffering in his eyes and a gentle manner that serves this character very well. Trapped in this hostile environment, where people seem entirely absorbed by secular concerns, the priest’s only escape is his diary, where he can give complete expression to his frustrations. By contrast, one of the most prominent aural effects in the film is the cacophony of footsteps receding from the priest, indicative of how the town has little use for him and is always moving away from him.

Yet, this most devout man is unable to pray himself. He suffers too much to pray, a "prisoner of the Holy Agony." Perhaps he can’t pray because he feels unworthy of God’s attention, or he worries that prayer may confirm his belief that God hates him. Still, his is a life of abject denial, abjuring all the pleasures of the flesh. He takes his vows very seriously, unlike priests in earlier generations who were all fat, according to one character. He seeks a state of Zen-like absence of all desire. The priest, whose Eraserhead-boy hair adds a certain Lynchian surrealism to the character, has a rather androgynous, even asexual quality, and his beliefs and habits give him a life that is as close to a purely spiritual one as a flesh and bone human could have. Subsisting on wine and bread (every meal is a sacrament), the priest claims he cannot eat anything else as his stomach will not digest it. We wonder, as does his mentor Father Torcy, if he might not be bringing all this illness on himself by refusing to eat anything of substance. Is he really not of this world, or is this a self-fulfilling prophecy?

The priest begins everyday with a firm resolve and determined gait, but these brief rallies of body and spirit rarely last, as his return at day’s end, beaten down, hunched over attests. Moving through the world as if he is on the verge of complete collapse, bearing the Sisyphusian weight of his parishioners indiscretions and hypocrisy, the priest is also assailed by his own fears, doubts and scruples. Bresson’s expressive black and white cinematography is reminiscent of early David Lean (Oliver Twist/Great Expectations) though a little more restrained. Presenting the priest as dwarfed by long shots of him trudging through the landscape, he is ever-diminishing in the townspeople’s and camera’s eye. He’s also presented as a figure hemmed in by the architecture—gates, doorways, window frames, he is even shot through glass—visible, but once-removed.

He soon realizes that people elude him, he doesn’t "get them." He seems almost mopey and pathetic, certainly self-loathing; we must be drawn to wonder why he bothers to invest so much of himself in a parish that returns so little. Even in his greatest triumph, in the remarkable spiritual showdown for the soul of the desperate Countess (sorta like The Exorcist, but w/o the pea soup and cuss words. Oh, and no Satan either. Come to think of it, nevermind), he is ultimately defeated by the town’s condemning misinterpretation of his motives. While he is able to give the Countess peace, he does not have any himself. At least, not until he is forced to flea Ambricourt in order to seek a doctor’s care for his worsening health.

The suffering endured by the priest as he tries to be a spiritual man in this spiritual wasteland, where he devotes himself to others who have no use for him, at the cost of his own well-being, indicates that Bresson is offering us a modern day retelling of the story of Christ. The priest finds peace only in the very few moments that he is able to escape from Ambricourt, such as during his motorcycle ride with the young activist Olivier, ultimately faces his personal Golgotha in a dirty attic in the northern French town of Lille, where he may not have a collection of disciples to carry on in his footsteps, but does have a witness to report that the young priest was finally able to proclaim that "All is Grace." It seems that there is no place in our increasingly secular world for these sorts of old-fashioned saints. As a contemporary comment on the powerful element of suffering and redemption that is the centre of the Christ story, Diary of a Country Priest is a very interesting and unexpectedly (for this old agnostic) moving experience, and would provide an interesting double bill with a certain controversial ’04 release that claims to walk down a similar road.

Score: 86/100

Le Corbeau (France, 1942, Henri-Georges Clouzot) AKA Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore!"

Context is key to fully appreciate the greatness of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Corbeau. Shot in the first year of the Nazi occupation of France under the watchful eye of German-controlled Vichy France, and by logical extension, the film industry, through Continental-Films (who understood the value of movies as propaganda better than they?), Clouzot’s film had to walk quite a tightrope in order to escape the censor’s scissors. Not only that, it had to withstand the attacks of French patriots who viewed Clouzot’s willingness to work with the German controlled film institute as proof that he was in the first rank of collaborators: A man who had sold his soul to the Devil just so he could continue to make movies.

But Le Corbeau ain’t just any old film. This taut, tightly wound 91m film is a despairing and morally complex look at the things that damaged people living in a dangerous time will do. That it is a thinly-veiled examination of the many difficulties of living in Vichy France is the common wisdom today, though that allegorical aspect of the film seems to have initially slipped past the folks at Continental-Film who okayed the film and the censors who allowed its release. So there’s some interesting meta-criticism going on w/r/t the film, in that folks wonder about the morality of taking money from the Nazis, while making a final product that is essentially anti-Nazi. ‘Tis a real head scratcher, that one. But, in the end, for any film of this sort to succeed, it must work at both literal AND allegorical level, and Le Corbeau most certainly does that.

Our attention throughout the film is focused on Dr. Remy Germain (Pierre Freznay), a secretive, curt and stolid man who claims that all he seeks from this life is peace, though we’re not initially sure what torments him, or from what he is trying to escape. He is first seen washing blood from his hands (is he Pilate? Macbeth? Why all this guilt?) after performing an apparently shady operation where the mother is saved, while the unborn child is not. That we don’t know him, yet are quick to pass judgment is one of the many preconceptions that will be used against us later.

Published over two decades years after the release of Le Corbeau, Shirley Jackon’s terrific short story "The Possibility of Evil" appears to have been inspired by Clouzot’s film. Both are built around the same premise, an anonymous citizen is writing poisonous letters attacking the townspeople’s misdeeds, in the hope that it will lead them to correct the error of the ways. Instead, in both story and film it creates a climate of paranoia and dis-ease that spreads like a virus, infecting everyone in it path. At first, the townspeople try to ferret out the epistle-writer, but soon grow frustrated with that, and instead turn their paranoid concerns to the most prominent victim of these insidious attacks, Dr. Germain. Complicating our reaction to these events, as the persistent victim of many of these smears, Germain is not a particularly appealing hero. He is cool and aloof, detached and even a little arrogant. And the charges made against him may have merit: Germain just might be guilty. And we just might cheer his fall.

When cracks begin to appear in Germain’s veneer, he turns to his landlord’s sister, the promiscuous Denise (Ginette Leclerc), for comfort. While she cannot promise eternal rest for all that troubles him, a few hours of oblivion is better than nothing. As is almost always the case w/ Clouzot, the film seethes with sexual tension. Germain is attracted to both Denise and Laura, a nurse’s sister who helps out in the hospital. The young and lovely Laura happens to be married to an elderly Dr. Vorzot, (Piere Larquey) is playing a cat-like role in the film, toying w/ the minds of the citizenry, though most fascinated by the mysterious Germain. while watching in the wings is Denise’s Lolita-like 14 ½ year old niece Rolande (Liliane Maigne), who is clearly smitten w/ the good doctor herself.

Clouzot fills the frame with moody imagery. There is the titular raven, of course, but the film also has a predominance of darkness in the lengthening shadows and the many characters who wear black dress. The contrast between light and dark/good and evil typically reflecting this post-Expressionist pre-film noir symbolism is best exemplified by the verbal face off between the sarcastic and seemingly omnipresent psychiatrist Vorzet and the frustrated and angry Germain while a lamp swings on a pendulum between ‘em. Clouzot’s influence in moments like this was obviously great. Not only did Hitchcock admire him, but the great Orson Welles used similar tactics in Touch of Evil, a full 15 years later.

The moral complexity of this film’s approach is thoroughly modern. Some of Le Corbeau’s wicked comic undertones are quietly slipped into the film, particularly in the scenes involving psychiatrist Vorzot. He is a clever and insightful cynic whose running commentary on the story is always good for a chuckle. While some of Clouzot’s targets are more subtlely attacked, such as the petit-bourgeois values of the townspeople (Denise dismisses Germain as pathetic because he’ll never rise above his narrow bourgeois mentality) much of Le Corbeau is about taking on much larger targets. Clouzot is obviously concerned about the effects on a society of living in a culture of informants and collaborators, and he is not afraid of also incriminating the audience as well as his film's characters. This is a town full of tiny monsters, each willing to betray his neighbour if it’ll bring him a little peace and quiet, a little refuge from life’s storm. Only in a Clouzot film would the sole figures of empathy and hope be such terribly damaged females; the limping Denise and the distraught but vengeful mother of an apparent suicide. But neither is heroic in any conventional sense, as both suffer from physical and emotional wounds that cause them terrible grief and leave them virtual pariahs in their community. This may be a restorative ending, but it is not without its victims and its open wounds.

Using secret informants to rule by fear was clearly a tactic the Germans found useful in Vichy France, so it isn't too surprising that once it was released, Clouzot’s film was deemed too dangerous, and soon shelved by the Nazis. Ironically, it wasn’t just the right wing who attacked it, but the communists as well. They viewed the film’s portrayal of the townspeople as too cynical, and lacking the appropriate sort of heroic values they wanted associated with the average Joe and Josephine fighting the good fight in wartime France. Equally disturbing to many on the left was the notion that Clouzot took money and resources from the Germans in order to produce films while the Nazi’s were simultaneously slaughtering thousands of innocent people all over Europe. In the end, while Clouzot was attacked as a collaborator for choosing to work with the Nazi-controlled Continental-Films, that didn’t stop him from making a film that the Nazis would soon realize was subversive, and which now stands tall above and beyond the criticisms of the day, as a biting comment on the degenerative effects of using vicious and paranoid practices to bind together in fear any society of people.

Score: 91/100

Seabiscuit (USA, 2003, Gary Ross) AKA Infield of Dreams

Seabiscuit falls victim to so many sports movie conventions that if one more person (or horse) had been given even one more hurdle to overcome, they would’ve had to make this a steeplechase movie. Depression-era set, and based on real events, Seabiscuit rests on a sound thematic foundation; in times of trouble, people need desperately to look outside themselves, to escape from the daily grind, in order to find heroes who can inspire them to greater things, even if those heroes come on four legs. However, writer/ director Gary Ross (Dave, Big) pushes every emotional button he can find, with excessive use of slo-mo, swelling emotion-cueing music and nostalgic period detail, but in the end I just felt kinda overworked (this sucker’s a good half hour too long) yet underwhelmed. Still, the film has redeeming qualities, not the least of which is Tobey Maguire, who is very good as the messed up jockey Red Pollard, who’s trying to take out a lifetime of anger on the horse track, two minutes at a time. If only the rest of the film had taken Maguire’s lead, and been a little less polished, a little less dependent on the stock figures like Macy’s mugging track announcer and Bridge’s loving and supportive spouse (Elizabeth Banks, who must really like working w/ Maguire—she’s in both Spider-Man films as well) or the various plot machinations of the sporting genre (Seabiscuit loses, but then he wins, wins and wins! Pollard loses, then he wins, wins, wins!) we just might have had something to really get behind here. Certainly, a very (almost too) good-looking film, with a timely theme, so it’s not terribly surprising that this crowd-pleaser was nominated for several Oscars. However, in the end, there is almost nothing beyond Maguire’s gritty work to elevate this film above any of the myriad other entrants in the sports genre field.

Score: 66/100

Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (USA, 2004, Sara Sugarman) AKA I Was a Teenage Mutant New Yawk Princess

Freaky Friday’s Lindsay Lohan, who seems to have been around forever, but is still only 17 years old, is warm, fuzzy and charming in a generic Disney kinda way, while her bud in the picture, played by Alison Pill (Pieces of April) seems to have a little more going on that that surface nerdiness betrays. Still and all, this is mostly just a collection of warmed over catty high school girls/fish outta water genre cliches propped up by a series of bland performances by the supporting cast (though to Carol Kane I direct these questions: What were you thinking? Has it come to this? Yikes, that was just awful!). The flick is not exactly saved, but at least it is modestly enhanced by the pop-up book visual playfulness of director Sugarman. Drama Queen’s most distinguishing characteristic may be that it has one of the most realistically tasteless pseudo-high school musical productions I’ve seen.

To the unasked question: Cuz I have two daughters, that’s why.

Score: 48/100