lukabossi

Pointless story of platonic love between a bored little rich girl and a bored movie star in Tokyo. Both characters are supposed to be profound - she as a philosophy major from Yale, he because he knows that acting in japanese ads for big money is not boosting his career... However, their behavior shows how incredibly shallow they are. Scarlett Johansson and "Bob Harris" are unable to learn one japanese sentence or even to consider than any Japanese is a human being worth listening to for more than ten seconds. Every Japanese character is superficial and soulless. He has an epiphany singing overrated white pop music in a karaoke. She gets hers discovering that she is not moved by monks in a Zen temple and then coming back to her 5-star hotel room to cry, looking down on Tokyo, feeling lots of pain... Their choice of life companions - his wife sounds stupid and her boyfriend is a shallow fashion photographer - is telling. The result is one of the less interesting love stories ever shot. Plus Sofia Coppola stole the basic idea of the beautiful In the Mood for Love for this one (she tries to hide it by actually showing us Giovanni Ribisi's character). The whole hype in the US and Europe tells how much international movie criticism is in a sad shape. Hopefully it got bad reviews in Japan.

Based on documents compiled by Michel Foucault, this film is a uniquely original meditation on a gruesome 19th century crime. The story happens in a Normandy village in 1835, as a very young man, Rivière, murders his mother, sister and brother before running away in the countryside. This matricide and the trial that followed are narrated by several voices over, which allow to "absorb" the violence and to understand the psychological background of the criminal. The written confession of Rivière himself becomes one of the voices, which gives away one aspect of the truth. Rivière was convinced that his mother was weakening and humiliating his father and his words on this subject are deeply disturbing.

The cast, mostly villagers found in the places where the events had taken place 150 years before and reenacting the gestures of their ancestors, is quite static but creates an interesting atmosphere of hyper-realism. Thanks to them and to the careful narration, René Allio accomplishes the unique feat to offer at the same time an (almost) ethnographic document, an historical film, and an inquiry into a psychopathologic case. His approach may seem naive at times, but the film is overall a winning affair, and is widely different from any other period picture set in similar time and place.

Highlights of Moi, Pierre Rivière are the striking first sequence, where we discover with a slow pan the bodies of the family and the first interrogation of the stunned murderer. The cinematography, by Nurith Aviv, is exemplary, and Allio appears here as one of the most daring and interesting filmmaker of the seventies.

A rare cinematic achievement and a courageous picture, one of the very few fictions in French cinema to address directly the Algerian war and colonial army practices such as rape and torture. The film looks semi-improvised, but the story is still very strong, centered on the fascistic officer played by a young, believable Philippe Léotard. Director Rene Vautier spent years in Algeria during the war fighting on the side of justice, and everything here feels completely authentic. Moving songs (by Pierre Tisserand), poignant desert landscapes, and a modest and deeply effective sense of what is right and what is wrong add to this underrated masterpiece.