A Matter of Life and Death

A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH   ****

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

1946

IDEA:  Having miraculously survived after jumping from his burning plane during World War II, a British pilot conducts a romance with the radio operator he had communicated with before the incident while he simultaneously prepares to stand before a celestial court and defend his right to live.

BLURB:  Some films operate at such an audacious and formidable level - conceptually, thematically, aesthetically - that you can’t help but give yourself over to their astonishments. Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death is one such film. A quixotic, genre-mashing fantasia from an industry and an era not especially known for their formal daring, the film executes its loopy premise with a full-throated bravado and visual elegance that are, to risk cliché, heavenly. But A Matter of Life and Death is so confident in its approach and so ravishing in its design that it resists cliché, even as it openly courts it in Borzagian appeals to the transcendent power of love. Like that filmmaker-romantic, Powell and Pressburger exult in the possibilities of cinema to capture and expand the imagination. Their opulent, thoughtful use of Technicolor, courtesy of DP Jack Cardiff, remains nearly unmatched in sheer beauty, and their astute sense of how and when to employ practical effects - animation, motorized sets, puppetry - yields movie magic more potent than CGI. Such formal ingenuity serves a film that’s both a top-shelf work of fantasy and a distinctly postwar time capsule, and in ways that are inextricable. Portraying, wittily, a cosmic legal battle for one man’s right to life and love in the wake of World War II, A Matter of Life and Death fancifully recovers a human(ism) lost during the war and uses it to disarm the deadly follies of nationalism. Powell and Pressburger land their shots at both the British and Americans in keenly sarcastic ways; they know, having just won the war together, that the two are as close as Peter and June. Could the actual human romance at the center of the film be more convincing, and could June have been something more than a stock female love interest? Sure, but some films are so grand that their spells overwhelm, offering visions of life (and death?) that make other concerns finally feel so puny.

My Little Loves

MY LITTLE LOVES   **1/2

Jean Eustache

1974

IDEA:  Sent by his grandmother to live with his mother for a year in the city, the pubescent Daniel falls in with a crowd of older boys. 

BLURB:  My Little Loves is sort of an anti-coming-of-age film, in that its pubescent protagonist goes from a budding sociopath who rubs up against a girl at mass to, by the end of a languid two hours, a budding sociopath who smokes a cigarette and more unashamedly feels up a girl. Played by the gangly, wide-eyed yet impassive Martin Loeb, Daniel is at once an unassuming delinquent and a sullen cypher, like a more taciturn Antoine Doinel, or Laurent Chevalier from Malle’s Murmur of the Heart. Eustache’s austerely minimalist, deliberately stilted Bressonian style is an odd fit for material like this, sapping a portrait of childhood of its characteristic nervous energy and excitement, leaving instead a sense of glacial, almost monotonous drift. If the director’s intent was to convey the indeterminacy of this phase of growing up, he only partly succeeds, and more because of the hauntingly elliptical blackouts that punctuate most of his scenes than anything in the writing or the acting. Rather, the pleasures of My Little Loves are granular and sensory, largely attributable to the lush, limpid cinematography of Néstor Almendros, who spins visual poetry out of even the most meandering episodes of this curiously static quasi-bildungsroman. 

Grand Jeté

GRAND JETÉ   **1/2

Isabelle Stever

2022

IDEA:  A former ballerina, now working as a dance instructor, engages in an affair with her estranged adult son.

BLURB:  In Grand Jeté, motherhood is a sadomasochistic ritual as precious as it is perverse. When we’re first introduced to Nadja (Sarah Grether), however, it’s not in the context of maternity but the vocation she long ago substituted for her role as a mother. Instead of rearing a child, Nadja received her licks as a ballerina, pushing the limits of her body through an art at once graceful and unforgivingly grueling until her body could take it no more. Constantin Campean’s camera cleaves to Nadja’s undulating bones and scarred skin in closeups so tight they become synecdochic of a woman’s crumbling midlife prospects. This sense of loss drives her to engage in an emphatically Oedipal relationship with her estranged son, through which she finds a figurative and literal second chance at motherhood. It’s not exactly clear, in this largely withholding film, what’s driving the son (besides an evident shared affinity for bodily punishment and drinking from the sink faucet), but then this isn’t really the story of his desire. While it often plays like a leaden Piano Teacher-like erotic provocation, Grand Jeté becomes, in its final moments, the dementedly poignant fable of a mother’s (re)birth.

The Boy Friend

THE BOY FRIEND   ***

Ken Russell

1971

IDEA:  In 1920s London, an assistant stagehand reluctantly steps into the lead role of a musical called "The Boy Friend" after the leading lady breaks her ankle.

BLURB:  The musical has often been noted as the one classical Hollywood genre in which narrative concerns can be subordinated to spectacle. Ken Russell’s The Boy Friend takes this logic to its extreme, tipping the scales so emphatically in favor of the spectacle that the narrative is close to a non-entity. Like the last act of a Busby Berkeley musical or the dream ballet sequence of a Freed-era MGM musical engorged to (long) feature length, The Boy Friend proceeds as a series of lavish production numbers, each one more decadently realized than the last. There’s a mythological Grecian bacchanal in a verdant wood; dancing figures atop supersized turntables; people dressed as glittery playing card suits climbing a golden lattice; and, in a number that must have resonated in an era of psychedelia, a frolicsome/feverish jaunt through a mushroom village. The implication in the Berkeley musicals - that these allegedly stage-bound spectacles could only ever be executed, and appreciated, through the medium of film - is made explicit by Russell through the meta-textual device of a Hollywood director viewing the stage show within the movie, intending to adapt it for the screen. Whether or not Russell’s film faithfully depicts (is adapt even the right word?) Sandy Wilson’s "The Boy Friend" is beside the point in this deeply irreverent pastiche, which seems to want nothing more than to fill our eyes and ears with only the borrowed, sugary excesses of movie-musical tropes until we're stuffed silly. One’s viewing ratio of pleasure-to-pain will vary, but the chutzpah of the endeavor is undeniable.

Dune: Part Two

DUNE: PART TWO   ***

Denis Villeneuve

2024

IDEA:  Paul grapples with his burgeoning role as the prophesied messiah of the Fremen amid an increasingly chaotic galactic battle for control of Arrakis.

BLURB:  Dune: Part Two largely exhibits the same qualities that made Part One such an unexpectedly vigorous, astute work of large-scale blockbuster filmmaking. These are primarily formal ones: cinematography, sound, and production design, especially, and the ways in which Villeneuve orchestrates these elements to immerse the viewer in a spectacle that has a tactilely epic scope. There’s perhaps no better single example of this in Part Two than Paul’s sandworm initiation, a sequence that combines suspenseful buildup, visual and sonic contrasts, lithe camera movement, and a strategic, culminating POV shot to thrilling sensory effect. To be sure, the film continues to display this audiovisual prowess over the remaining two hours, and with a lucidity and apparent ease that is truly impressive, if not quite as awe-inspiring as it seemed in Part One. If the craft of the film is mostly unimpeachable, however, the same cannot be said for the writing and acting. Part Two tangibly strains as the story builds toward revolutionary ferment and the radicalization of Paul into a power-hungry tyrant, an operatic Lawrence of Arabia-esque arc neither the script nor a sluggish Chalamet are quite able to pull off. The relative blandness of the characters as performed - already a deficiency in Part One - becomes a greater liability in this chapter as they’re tasked with wrangling ever-more dramatic emotional and psychological developments. It’s a testament to the film’s sheer formal virtuosity that, despite the sense that the Spice has lost some of its cinematic potency, Dune: Part Two still proves a grandly exciting time.

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore

ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE   ***1/2

Martin Scorsese

1974

IDEA:  Following the sudden death of her husband, a woman sets off with her 11-year-old son through the American Southwest to start a new life.

BLURB:  In the context of Scorsese’s recent output of stately three-hour-plus historical epics, it is truly jolting to revisit an early work such as Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, which thrums with a vibrantly offbeat and freewheeling energy that feels mostly foreign to the director’s work in the 21st century. One laments the film’s widespread dismissal as merely his anomalous “women’s picture.” Of course, the film is Scorsese’s version of a women’s picture, and brilliantly so, taking the tropes of a classical Hollywood melodrama and spiking them with a bracingly New Hollywood audiovisual language. Through writing, acting, cinematography, editing, and sound, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is constantly defying expectations of what kind of shape and tone this story should have. This playfully protean approach results in some of Scorsese’s brightest and most inventively rangy filmmaking, from the teasing Technicolor artifice of the prologue to the tiny comedic masterpieces of the road trip scenes, which use sonic repetition and smash cuts to convey Alice’s growing irritation with her antsy passenger. Sometimes within the same scene, Scorsese toggles between registers of madcap farce and documentary verisimilitude, a combination that, if not always seamless, is never less than invigorating in the affects it generates. It’s all anchored by the nonpareil chemistry between Ellen Burstyn’s Alice and Alfred Lutter’s Tommy, one of cinema’s most winsomely unconventional mother-son duos. By turns antagonistic, chummy, and Oedipal, it’s a mercurial relationship that emblematizes the film’s dynamic, slippery portrait of a woman who exists beyond archetype. 

Sexy Beast

SEXY BEAST   ***1/2

Jonathan Glazer

2001

IDEA:  Retired gangster Gal is living an idyllic domestic life in southern Spain when an old associate comes to rope him into a bank heist.

BLURB:  Ben Kingsley’s lunatic gangster Don Logan drops into Sexy Beast like the most unwelcome houseguest ever, and despite the resistance of his hosts, he never really leaves. He’s a classic disruptor, an existential rupture signifying a return of the repressed. In the gangster genre, this comes in the form of a past acquaintance beckoning the protagonist back to a life of crime, and this is certainly the case in Sexy Beast. But Don Logan is not your typical gangster; in Glazer’s narrative formulation and Kingsley’s splanchnic performance, he’s more like the inextinguishable monster from a horror movie. And like a horror movie, Sexy Beast is about boundaries erected, transgressed, and put tenuously back up again. Glazer conceives of a number of imaginative metaphors for this border-crossing, perhaps none more so than the climactic break-in of a bank vault from an adjoining bathhouse, in which the violent drilling of the pool wall and the subsequent eruption of water is intercut with the bloody pummeling of Don Logan, seemingly unwilling to die - or stay dead. Gal’s laborious attempted suppression of Logan is coextensive with the generalized air of sexual repression and paranoia that, at the expense of the underwritten female characters, points up a frustrated masculinity that so often underlies gangster films. Although familiar in that way, Sexy Beast is crafted with such exciting, idiosyncratic audiovisual flair and caustic humor that it doesn’t quite feel like any other crime film out there.