Mouchette
January 15th, 2007
A new disc from the Criterion Collection can feel a little bit like trying a new vegetarian dish. Sometimes it’s juicy and delicious, sometimes you feel like you ought to like it just because it’s oh-so-healthy (and then you’re glad you did), and sometimes it’s broccoli rabe.
Robert Bresson’s final black-and-white film, an adaptation of a tragic novel by Georges Bernanos, delivers a striking portrait of abject poverty. The early scenes, when young Mouchette shuffles on oversize clogs between school and flop house home (drunken father, wasting mother, screaming baby) are quite affecting. Bresson is up to his usual exposition-less tricks, and the stark naturalism is bracing. Mouchette is unloved at home and abused at school, so who’s to blame her when she throws some mud at the pretty classmates in their fancy dresses? But then, she turns out to be a character with no options, and storylines involving a) poachers and b) epileptics and c) rapists are always a problem for me. When there are poaching rapists with foaming epileptic seizures, I’m in deep trouble. Au Hasard Blathazar struck me as sublime evocation of suffering, but here, after only 81 minutes, I was just glad that the suffering–Mouchette’s and mine–was finally over. The DVD comes out tomorrow.
Mouchette. Robert Bresson, 1967. **
[tags]2 stars, film, french, robert bresson, criterion collection, tragedy, suffering, poachers, epileptics, rape, poverty, alcoholism, suicide[/tags]
Babel
December 2nd, 2006
Didn’t hate this quite as much as Marcy, but some of that probably has to do with watching it in installments, my own little miniseries of misery. Not the ideal way to watch anything, but I simply couldn’t stand to sit through it all at once.
What’s Babel about? Global scenes of suffering, vaguely interrelated, adding up to nothing whatsoever. The title suggests that there’s a point made about communication with all that screaming and bleeding, but what exactly is it? Seemed to me, the take-away was: guns make bad presents. I already suspected as much.
Babel. Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2006. *
[tags]alejandro gonzalez inarritu, film, 1 star, suffering, tokyo, mexico, marocco, guns, blood, brad pitt, cate blanchett, gael garcia bernal[/tags]
L’Enfant
November 18th, 2006
L’Enfant won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, but it’s going on our worst-of-year list. The set up is interesting enough: a homeless teenager leaves the hospital with a newborn, and her small-time crook boyfriend decides that it would be a good idea to sell the baby for a handful of cash. The technical term for this kind of a man is “raging asshole,” and instead of giving us the mother’s story, the film’s focuses on him as he tries to steal enough money to buy back the child, avoid the cops, and dig himself into an ever-deeper hole. It would have been a challenge to make this character even borderline likable, but the Dardennes don’t even try. The amount of callousness, stupidity, and ignorance on display is overwhelming, and in the unearned final scene, we’re suddenly asked to embrace the babymonger’s unlikely redemption. This is the kind of preposterous fake-gritty hokum that gives art house film a bad name–call it the Crash of Cannes.
L’Enfant. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2005. *
[tags]film, dardenne brothers, belgium, cannes, palme d’or, baby, fathers, 1 star, crooks, suffering, asshole, gritty[/tags]
