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matt-201's rating
It's an old story: a filmmaker is crowned king of all he beholds. As a follow-up to his calling card, he decides to call in all his chips--make an homage to the romantic opium of High Hollywood. But he's not going to make the usual pablum--he's going to tell the truth about the ugly world he lives in while arousing us silly with googly-eyed, sentimental movie tropes. Martin Scorsese followed up TAXI DRIVER with NEW YORK, NEW YORK, Coppola came back from APOCALYPSE NOW with ONE FROM THE HEART, and Jean-Jacques Beineix tried to top DIVA with THE MOON IN THE GUTTER. And in 1991, the then-wunderkind of French cinema, Leos Carax, bet it all on LES AMANTS DU PONT-NEUF.
These follies--a combination of studio sugar and bitter pill--never work. Carax's movie--many agonizing years in the making--doesn't either, but its head is screwed on a little more tightly than those other films'. His hero is a homeless, inarticulate boy; his heroine, a one-eyed painter losing her one good eye. He piles on bits of shtikum from movies he's too young for: a hobo who owns the keys to a museum, tramps poisoning the cups of coffee-sipping bourgeois to pick their pockets, an antique box stuffed with franc notes perched perilously close to the Seine. The alternation between this mothball-stinky hokum and grim, Frederick Wisemanish cinema verite depictions of the life of the homeless in Paris is meant to have a dazzling teeter-totter effect.
But the combination of Cassavetes and Vincente Minnelli in NEW YORK, NEW YORK was meant to wow too--and Scorsese is a better director than Carax. The movie's yin and yang, rather than balancing, cancel each other out. And you might feel guilty about noticing that the movie's big set piece--a romantic dance on the Pont-Neuf bridge as Quatorze Juillet fireworks burst--would have been nailed twenty times better by an American hack like Michael Bay. These folly-fantasias, always dubbed "delirious" in the press, are always oddly enervated. The gimcrackery of old-time moviemaking, once the suspension of disbelief is removed, makes for a dictionary definition of hollow form. And Carax isn't helped much by his actors, especially Juliette Binoche--who gropes at the anti-glamour of her role like a one-man band playing the Kentucky Waltz with seventeen spoons.
These follies--a combination of studio sugar and bitter pill--never work. Carax's movie--many agonizing years in the making--doesn't either, but its head is screwed on a little more tightly than those other films'. His hero is a homeless, inarticulate boy; his heroine, a one-eyed painter losing her one good eye. He piles on bits of shtikum from movies he's too young for: a hobo who owns the keys to a museum, tramps poisoning the cups of coffee-sipping bourgeois to pick their pockets, an antique box stuffed with franc notes perched perilously close to the Seine. The alternation between this mothball-stinky hokum and grim, Frederick Wisemanish cinema verite depictions of the life of the homeless in Paris is meant to have a dazzling teeter-totter effect.
But the combination of Cassavetes and Vincente Minnelli in NEW YORK, NEW YORK was meant to wow too--and Scorsese is a better director than Carax. The movie's yin and yang, rather than balancing, cancel each other out. And you might feel guilty about noticing that the movie's big set piece--a romantic dance on the Pont-Neuf bridge as Quatorze Juillet fireworks burst--would have been nailed twenty times better by an American hack like Michael Bay. These folly-fantasias, always dubbed "delirious" in the press, are always oddly enervated. The gimcrackery of old-time moviemaking, once the suspension of disbelief is removed, makes for a dictionary definition of hollow form. And Carax isn't helped much by his actors, especially Juliette Binoche--who gropes at the anti-glamour of her role like a one-man band playing the Kentucky Waltz with seventeen spoons.
The experience of an Eric Rohmer movie now involves the dissolution of the rote conversation into a focus on the underlying sound: birdsong, high heels on gravel, the tinkle of forks and the plash of vin ordinaire. The talk is so pro forma that the atmosphere is all; and that atmosphere--so evocative of a glass of Mint Melody tea sipped while listening to NPR--may explain the current renaissance of the near-octogenarian director. Rohmer's last art-house hit was PAULINE AT THE BEACH, which I suspect succeeded mostly for its poster art of Arielle Dombasle's snugly swimsuited rump. In the fifteen intervening years, the culture's clock has more than come round again; an NPR reviewer defined AUTUMN TALE as "wry, ironic, and above all civilized." And isn't that what older viewers who pay to see European movies want to spend eight dollars on, anyway?
I hoped against hope that Rohmer, whom I haven't paid much attention to in recent years, had something on the ball that I missed in my callow moviegoing youth. But a recent reviewing of CLAIRE'S KNEE--fresh, organic-feeling, stuffed to bursting with ripe travel-poster images by Nestor Almendros--showed that reiteration hasn't produced reinvention in Rohmer. His characters tend to fall into two categories--the Rueful but Still Horny Grown-ups, and the Coquettish but Surprisingly Sage Nymphets. The sleazy sting in Rohmer's and-the-children-shall-lead-us moralizing is gone; but without that Humbert flavor, what's left is creepily enervated--sentimentality without melodrama. That recipe--complacency without contrivance, without the hoky apparatus of schmaltzy lowbrow art--probably explains what makes him wry, ironic, and always civilized.
In early Rohmer--even in a grating work such as THE AVIATOR'S WIFE--there were short-storyish "psychological insights" (a familiar term of Rohmerian praise) to be gleaned. By now, finding them is like going on an Easter-egg hunt; in their place are the indulgent-but-mean leers of his women and the grimaces of lustful befuddlement of his men. Are critics and audiences so battered by blockbusteritis that work as arid as this can be greeted with euphoric sighs of relief? By now, a younger generation of French directors, such as Olivier Assayas, work this terrain with surprising, sometimes brutal results. Has a Rohmer character ever startled an audience with what they're capable of? Have the stakes ever been higher than a broken date?
AUTUMN TALE left me gasping for a little divy energy. And in a summer in which BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, EYES WIDE SHUT and AUTUMN TALE receive rapturous praise, it left me wondering what has caused American film critics' sudden burst of short-term memory loss. We've seen all this stuff before.
I hoped against hope that Rohmer, whom I haven't paid much attention to in recent years, had something on the ball that I missed in my callow moviegoing youth. But a recent reviewing of CLAIRE'S KNEE--fresh, organic-feeling, stuffed to bursting with ripe travel-poster images by Nestor Almendros--showed that reiteration hasn't produced reinvention in Rohmer. His characters tend to fall into two categories--the Rueful but Still Horny Grown-ups, and the Coquettish but Surprisingly Sage Nymphets. The sleazy sting in Rohmer's and-the-children-shall-lead-us moralizing is gone; but without that Humbert flavor, what's left is creepily enervated--sentimentality without melodrama. That recipe--complacency without contrivance, without the hoky apparatus of schmaltzy lowbrow art--probably explains what makes him wry, ironic, and always civilized.
In early Rohmer--even in a grating work such as THE AVIATOR'S WIFE--there were short-storyish "psychological insights" (a familiar term of Rohmerian praise) to be gleaned. By now, finding them is like going on an Easter-egg hunt; in their place are the indulgent-but-mean leers of his women and the grimaces of lustful befuddlement of his men. Are critics and audiences so battered by blockbusteritis that work as arid as this can be greeted with euphoric sighs of relief? By now, a younger generation of French directors, such as Olivier Assayas, work this terrain with surprising, sometimes brutal results. Has a Rohmer character ever startled an audience with what they're capable of? Have the stakes ever been higher than a broken date?
AUTUMN TALE left me gasping for a little divy energy. And in a summer in which BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, EYES WIDE SHUT and AUTUMN TALE receive rapturous praise, it left me wondering what has caused American film critics' sudden burst of short-term memory loss. We've seen all this stuff before.
Now released under the absurdly named Mack Video as the absurdly named BLACK KINGPIN, LA MALA ORDINA, once known as MANHUNT, shows the Italian seventies policier director Fernando DiLeo in peak form. The Italian cops-mob-and-corruption movies often had a neorealist tincture, not far from such British cousins as GET CARTER or THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY. (The best in this vein is the dark, harrowing VIOLENT NAPLES.) But some of them were as ripe and over-the-top as concurrent works of Italian horror; and this saga of a small-town pimp pursued, God knows why, by Mr. Big and two Vincent-and-Jules-looking U.S.-made button men, looks like the product of some torrid motel-room coitus between Sergio Leone and Don Siegel. The faces are sweaty, the beatings (to evoke Roger Ebert's memorable phrase) suggest the sound of ping-pong paddles smacking naugahyde sofas--the only thing that's missing is the groan of an Ennio Morricone score. An evening of Shane Black quips it ain't, but ninety minutes of top-shelf hardboiled groove it is.