Metaphors and other toys: Adieu au Langage (Jean-Luc Godard, 2014)

There's so much to say about Jean-Luc Godard's Adieu au Langage — a movie that's too deliberately cryptic (some would say irritating) to be taken completely seriously, and at the same time too intelligent to be dismissed as a simple divertissement from an octogenarian director who had already secured himself a place in the annals of cinema 50 years ago. The risk is to get lost amidst nebulous conjectures about the story, or succumb to the temptation to summarize in a single sentence the message it supposedly conveys. I'll try to avoid both approaches, focusing instead on some of the questions that occurred to me after the viewing.

Two films from the Balkans: Zakloni (Ivan Salatić, Montenegro, 2014) and Okean (Tamara Drakulić, Serbia, 2014)

Picture courtesy of Ivan Salatić.

The 32nd edition of the Turin Film Festival, an annual event that is as old as this blogger, ran in my hometown from November 21 to 29. This year the festival offered a rich selection of American movies of the 70s, so I had the opportunity to catch up with little-seen films like the irresistibly funny Taking Off (1971), which was Czech director Miloš Forman's foray into Hollywood, as well as renowned ones, like Sydney Pollack's paranoia-drenched Three Days of the Condor (1975), for which I've miraculously managed to stay away from spoilers for 32 years. Among the films in competition I saw the short feature film Zakloni (Shelters) by Ivan Salatić from Montenegro, in combination with Okean (Ocean) by Serbian director Tamara Drakulić; I give a brief account of the screenings in the following.

The horror of choice: Woman in the Dunes(Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964)

The ant-lion, also known as doodlebug, is a tiny predatory insect that digs little pits in the sand, then hides at the bottom waiting for preys, typically ants, to fall in. When this happens, the sides of the pit start to collapse, dragging the ant down toward its doom. If you are wondering why I'm telling you this, you probably haven't seen Woman in the Dunes.

Confusion is sexy: Under The Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013)

Jean-Luc Godard once said that every movie is ultimately a documentary about its actors. This is particularly true of Under The Skin, Jonathan Glazer's first effort in ten years. In fact, despite most reviews describing it as a sci-fi film about an unnamed alien, actually the protagonist does have a name: it's Scarlett Johansson.

Coming full circle: The Broken Circle Breakdown(Felix Van Groeningen, 2012)

Unfairly overshadowed by Paolo Sorrentino's La Grande Bellezza in the foreign-language film category at the 2014 Oscars, this remarkable movie from Belgium reminds us that heavy subjects don't necessarily make heavy movies. There are many ways a filmmaker can engage us emotionally without appealing to our most basic Pavlovian instincts.

The Cow-Boy Girl contest comes to an end

Had the only raison d'être of this blog been to provide David Bordwell with the missing piece of the Magnificent Ambersons puzzle, I'd still be happy with it. That being said, I hope there's more to life than The Cow-Boy Girl and that we will have more occasions to talk about cinema in fresh and engaging ways.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, here you can read Bordwell's final blog entry on the quest, with the links to the previous posts and the poster I discovered on the eHumanity archive.

Please don't expect such exploits from me every week!

Hurrah! A poster! A poster!

You may recall that at the end of May I tried to contribute to solve a mystery involving an unidentified poster briefly appearing in a scene of Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons. Film historian David Bordwell was responsible for it.

Disney's Maleficent: Adding complexity, with caution

One of the most common complaints leveled against Disney films has always been the lack of complexity. Their detractors generally emphasize that the Disney universe seem to adhere to a rigid Good/Evil dichotomy, with little or no room for nuanced, multi-faceted characters. Disney's latest effort Maleficent, a live-action reinterpretation with gothic undertones of the 1959 iconic animated feature film Sleeping Beauty, appears like a curious attempt to break with tradition and respond to those allegations with a shining counterexample.

On the origins of a Hitchcockian dictum

In my last entry I discussed Xavier Dolan's 2013 thriller Tom at the Farm. I tried to show how, in my opinion, the director's failed attempts at building suspense largely depended on bad staging and ineffective camera placement. In fact, despite many reviews having described Dolan's work as "Hitchcockian", the term seemed to me totally out of place in that case.

Killing the suspense: Xavier Dolan's Tom at the Farm (2013)

Recovering from what for me was easily the worst cinematic experience of the year and in the impossibility of rewinding the whole thing in my head, I decided that I had to make something good out of it by at least trying to understand why it had been so frustrating. Was it Xavier Dolan's omnipresent, falsely angelic face? Or maybe the exploitation of the theme of homosexuality to seek the viewer's complicity? No. Apparently, it had something to do with camera placement.