Truffaut!

#4: Small Change (L'argent de poche)


This 1976 François Truffaut film centers on the children, mostly boys, in Thiers during the final weeks of the school year. As in his earlier film, The 400 Blows (1959), Truffaut creates a world almost wholly from the boys' point of view as they wander from adventures to boredom and back. Adults are depicted as loving, demanding, and largely incomprehensible creatures who exist only in their relationship to the boys themselves.

The film covers similar ground to that of The 400 Blows but these children of 1970's France must have been enigmas to Truffaut. Unlike the intensely personal and painful characterizations in The 400 Blows, the kids here are seen from a distance. The experience of this film is much more observational and less affective than the earlier film. In fact, much of the film carries a documentary, nearly home movie, vibe wherein the camera simply observes kids doing normal kid things with no direction, narrative arc, or any of the tropes normally associated with dramatic film.

Which is not to suggest that this film does not have its own charm. Compared to his earlier flick, there is more variety in the experiences of childhood depicted here along with a fairly didactic message that the larger civil and political society is capable of, and obligated to, ameliorate the personal and private failings of individuals in their relations to their children. Children may be neglected but they are not left to fend for themselves in a world of indifferent and self absorbed adults. In Small Change children enjoy the warm embrace of a benign and involved community. This difference may more than anything else simply reflect the difference in how childhood feels as a child and how it looks from the vantage of adulthood.

If the neglected boy in this film were to create an autobiographical film of his childhood 10 years later, I suspect it would look more like The 400 Blows than Small Change.

The audience in this film was fascinating as well. There is a long scene where a slightly distracted single mother leaves her toddler alone while she retraces her steps into the village looking for her lost wallet. The preternaturally adorable child follows a similarly adorable kitten onto the ledge of an open window. From there Truffaut largely plays the tension for laughs--will the kitten fall? will the child fall?--as the neighbors gather below grousing about the negligent mother. Ultimately the child does fall, bounces, and toddles away unharmed. The lesson is that children are more resilient than we think. Needless to say this humor did not play as intended.

I liked this film, although I liked The 400 Blows better. It wanders without much direction, it is close, intimate, and episodic. Nothing explodes. The French are apparently indifferent about what happens to their baguettes before they are eaten.

The Messenger Guest Review by Michael

#3: The Messenger
Woody Harrelson showed his range this year. From Zombieland to The Messenger. Ben Foster is Sgt Montgomery, a solider with 3 months left and is assigned to Next of Kin notification with Harrelson. By day, Foster is a serious solider who at first approaches his new assignment as he would any other military mission, further, he seems normal by day. But the front doesn't last by night, where he struggles with the emotional trauma of returning to the States by drinking, loud violent music and trashing his apartment and sleeping on the floor like he would in theater. Foster's character finds himself drawn to a widow that he had just notified. But not in a sexual way, rather as he struggles with the physical and emotional healing from both the battle injuries and the recent loose of a long time sweetheart, he seeks the widow out for as an emotional anchor.

Woody's character in initially the alpha personality between the two. but by the end, both lean on each other and Montgomery comes around and starts thinking about the future. this isn't a war film, it's a film about how one person's job changes the lives of others forever in an instant, how to honor both the KIA and the family and the burden of responsibility that these two people struggle with each notification.
4 out of 5.

Still Backblogging

#2: Trucker

This is one of those quiet, slow, independent films that remind me of the kinds of films that Miramax released in the late 1980's before Tarantino landed there and way before the Weinsteins sold the label to Disney. The kinds of independent films spoofed by Robert Downey Jr. in the fake movie trailers in Tropic Thunder.

In this film, the hardened, free spirited, trucker (who looks like no trucker you've ever seen and clearly is not living on a diet of Mt. Dew)is forced to acknowledge, and ultimately embrace, her feminine side when her dying ex husband leaves their 11 year old child with her. In many ways this is a fairly predictable film; the trucker has built a life that allows her fierce independence and isolates her from any real human contact. The freedom of her life as an independent operator is bracketed by anonymous hook ups on the road and drunken escapades with her married (but clearly smitten) next door neighbor. But, of course, we are encouraged to see that all this independence and autonomy is really just a lame attempt to compensate for her crippling inability to cede any control to anyone else in her life. Of course, this cannot withstand the advent of a sullen 11 year old boy. Struggle, abandonment, gratuitous sexual violence (perhaps penance for flaunting working class notions of propriety), epiphany and closure as a now-full-woman-with-adult-responsibilities to follow.

Michelle Monaghan plays the lead and she does a fine job suggesting a depth of character not necessarily in the material. Her acting makes both her initial isolation and subsequent transformation ambiguous. Something in her body language makes it seem possible that she could spin off the rails at any moment. But the film does not require this of her and gives her little opportunity to do so.

Overall, this film is not bad. It actually has a narrative arc and the cinematography is evocative although, honestly, the visual metaphor of the isolation of life on the road, always moving through scenery but separated from it as an observer through the windshield, is fairly trite. It feels like a film that was written, rather than tested, and the characters mostly talk and act like real people. If that is good or bad is, I suspect, a matter of taste.

Antichrist and the backblog

A confession is both in order and appropriate to this post. I've had my movie pass for a while. It took me longer to set up the blog than to see eight movies. Since this is a fallow time in my movie schedule, it seems a good time to whittle away at those films.

#1: Antichrist.

I maybe hate this movie. I maybe love this movie. I really don't know. At once it is openly pornographic, decidedly weird, and puts the whole idea of the idyllic country house retreat into doubt. If you dream about going to the country to write for a summer, you may not want to see this film. More than anything, it reminds me of director Lars von Trier's earlier film Europa. At any rate, it has little in common with his Dogma-95 films (which is all for the good, in my opinion, having high regard for both writers and editors). This film has the surrealism of his films Europa and Manderlay but without the minimalist cinematography and sets. Much of the strangest visual material has a purposefully ham handed CGI quality. And it is weird.

The film centers on the question of whether women are inherently evil or if this particular woman is just nuts, apparently driven so by working on her Ph.D. Willem Dafoe's character seems to exemplify the inability of men to resist really good sex, even if it is transgressive, professionally suspect, and just downright strange. The female lead's character (Charlotte Gainsbourg)apparently represents women's conflicted natures in re: their primary biological role in both Eros and Thanatos. Oh, and their child dies in the first scene, apparently because neither of them can control their sexual desire, so there is a good dose of puritan guilt about enjoying sex. Initially it seems that overcoming this guilt and developing a healthy, lusty, athletic, attitude toward marriage-sanctified sex is the cure for what ails them. By the end it seems pretty clear that all of the guilt and fears were well founded.

This film is not for the queasy. Lots of sexual violence, some of it onanistic, much of it presented in a fashion as to be calculatedly transgressive before becoming just plain transgressive. Plus a lot more of Willem Dafoe's naked ass than is technically essential to the plot.

Welcome to My Movie Year

This is an experiment in film watching. For the next 12 months I will have unlimited access to the Starz Film Center in the Tivoli Student Center on the Auraria Campus. Unlimited all-access annual pass. Just the thought makes me dizzy. Good films, bad films, saddle-up-for-the weird films. Because the costs are already sunk, there is no limit to the films I can, and will, see. I expect it will be like the film festival experience when one just goes to see movies just because. Nuns, Nazis, Nazi Nuns, its all good.

And I'm going to blog them all.

So what will follow over the coming months is a diary of my film year, culminating in the Denver International Film Festival in November 2010. Occasionally others who see the films with me may contribute but mostly I'll be blogging from my IPhone from the seats at the Starz Film Center as I finish my beer.