Bellamy - The great Claude Chabrol's last film, his summary of it as 'Maigret on vacation' is very apt. Depardieu is the detective on holiday who gets embroiled in a mystery while dealing with the tense relationship between him and his brother. It is very much a continuation of the themes and ideas that Chabrol explored throughout his career and while not in the very top draw of Chabrol's it shows that even after 50(?) films he was still doing some good work.
La Ceremonie - Now this is from the top draw, Chabrol's adaptation of Ruth Rendell's
A Judgement in Stone. Despite moving the plot forward two decades (from the mid-70s to the mid-90s) the tensions of class and provincial life still work. Isabelle Huppert is her usual quality, and the actors playing the family are good (including Jean-Pierre Cassel and a very young Virginie Leydon) but Sandrine Bonnaire steals the show as the illiterate Sophie. Her can feel her fear and panic at the appearance of the notes from the family that she tries to decipher. Bonnaire also stars, in a very different role, in one of my other favourite Chabrol's
The Colour of Lies, I don't know why she is not a bigger star, she is clearly an excellent actor (as well as being very attractive, which shouldn't matter, but of course did/does).
Splendour in the Grass - Elia Kazan directs Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood as mixed up kids. It's all very 60s melodrama, the gap of understanding between parents and children. For me there is an awful lot of ACTING going on. And it lacks the subtlety of the excellent
Wild River, Kazan made a year earlier. Still it does look gorgeous.
A Prophet - Re-watched this on MUBI, I saw it at the cinema when it was first released and was very impressed, and I'm still impressed on this viewing. Tahar Rahim and Niels Arestrup are excellent, some of the scenes are really beautiful. The 2 1/2 hour time is probably pushing it a little, losing 15 minutes would not have hurt but still an excellent piece of work. I'm looking forward to watching
Dheepan (which I've not seen before)
The Ex-Mrs Bradford - An attempt to capture the success of
The Thin Man mix of screwball comedy with crime mystery, William Powell basically plays the same role but Jean Arthur steps in for Myrna Loy. It does not quite have the sharpness and speed of the best of
The Thin Man series but there are some very nice gags, it's good fun and Arthur and Powell are charming.
Then I caught up on the Marlene Desire season Melbourne Cinematheque had/are having watching
Angel,
Desire and
A Foreign Affair.
Angel is very Lubitsch (not a bad thing) and Dietrich plays off Herbert Marshall well, but it suffers from a badly cast Melvyn Douglas who not only looks and sounds very American (he's supposed to be English) but is also not very credible as someone who Dietrich would fall for.
Desire has a great start, it sets off at a hundred miles an hour and it works, Cooper's interaction with his boss to get a holiday and Dietrich's jewell theft are brilliant, but it loses pace a bit in the middle travel section and the final third is weaker still, having Dietrich cowed by Cooper does not work and is just disappointing.
A Foreign Affair is my favourite of the three, I'm not a huge fan of Wilder - I recognise he's an excellent director but a lot of his films just do not click with me - but this is great. Dietrich certainly does not let any man take her down here, and Jean Arthur is fantastic as the business first, morally upright Iowa congresswoman who falls in love. The script is brilliant, the unashamedly literary speech given by the US colonel when taking the congress committee for a tour of Berlin is a masterpiece. And there are just some very simple but funny gags. Only slight let down is John Lund as the love interest, he does not convince as the ladies man.
Undine - Christian Petzold is one of my favourite modern directors, but I saw mixed reviews for this most recent film of his so was a little apprehensive sitting down to watch this. I did not need to be as is it excellent. For a start it is a wonderfully beautiful film to look at, the colours are amazing (lots of rich reds and greens), it's portrait of Berlin looks great (I've never been so no idea how accurate it is), I absolutely want to go and visit the museum (if if exists) where Undine works and see the models of the city. Then the acting is uniformly good, Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski are great in the lead roles but the supporting cast is all on the ball too. It's a perfect 90 minutes, no flab. It is more fey, or fantastical than you might associate with Petzold's work like
Barbara or
Phoenix, but I agree with the
Sight and Sound review, that these elements are within Petzold's older work, what you have is a change of tack not a total shift in style. Absolutely recommend this
. (I should start stating that I think)...I'd not heard of it before seeing Bradshaw's list of Baftas contenders yesterday morning. I'll have a look for Falling.
