Review - A Gentle Woman (1969)

As chromatically vibrant as it is hopelessly bleak, Robert Bresson's first color film from 1969 features much of the human misery one expects from the French auteur, but little in the way of spiritual recompense. Adapted from a short story by Dostoyevsky, it is an account of the toxic marriage between a parsimonious pawnbroker (Guy Frangin) and his young wife (Dominique Sanda), given by him in the moments following her sudden and unexpected suicide. He details initial encounters, their union for purely pragmatic reasons (she is poor and idealistic, he desires a sex object-cum-pupil) and the grinding daily existence that impels her to break free in most extreme fashion. Bresson's ravishing new color palette, seemingly tailored to suit Sanda's radiant, green-eyed visage, offers little respite from his oppressively grim take on modern matrimony. Like the inept production of Hamlet that features in one extended scene, he equates it to a poorly acted farce, one that masks brutal cycles of emotional blackmail, economic dependance and objectification. The correlation between financial and metaphysical bondage is not a new subject for the director, nor is suicide, a theme he first broached with 1967's 'Mouchette.' What's new, or rather what's conspicuously missing, is the transformative grace that accompanies the self-destructive act. The existentialist notion of suicide without salvation - closer to Camus than Dostoyevsky - animates this brooding, visually beautiful work, and would permeate another of Bresson's late-period masterpieces, 'The Devil Probably.'

Review - Bay of Angels (1963)

In much the same way that his debut 'Lola' was influenced by an earlier film - Max Ophüls' 'Lola Montes' - Jacques Demy's second feature draws inspiration from another, far more unlikely source: Robert Bresson's 'Pickpocket.' For roughly the first quarter of its runtime, everything from the grey Parisian backdrop to the stolid protagonist (Claude Mann, in Bressonian dark suit) who descends into a disreputable demimonde (the world of high stakes gambling) recalls the redemptive thrust of the austere 1959 masterwork. (There's even an intricate roulette tutorial akin to 'Pickpocket's thieving lessons, and several shots of currency being counted and exchanged that hint at the pervasive, corrupting influence of money.) When the action shifts to Nice, however, Bresson's severe spell is broken. Just as Mann cannot stifle a smile when he meets and falls for Jeanne Moreau's blonde beauty, a "professional" roulette player who doesn't know when to quit, Demy can't help but yield his camera more poetically when faced with the romantic vistas of the French Riviera. Subjected to his dreamy gaze, beachfront hotels ooze elegance, palm trees sway invitingly, and the lamps lining the beach glow effervescently, as does Moreau, clad in all white. Demy's stylistic opulence and characteristically bittersweet themes beat out Bresson's profound preoccupations; hence, the parallel between the euphoric highs and ignominious lows of a gambling spree, and the vertiginous emotional trajectory of an unexpected love affair.

Review - Los Olvidados (1950)

Luis Buñuel exposes the desperate, dog-eat-dog existence of impoverished street children in this indelible 1950 drama, an early gem from his fruitful Mexican period. Set in the slums of the capitol city, it concerns a gang of delinquents, the titular "forgotten ones." Their pastimes range from rough-housing and staying out late to relieving cripples and blind beggars of their cash. Pedro (Alfonso Mejía) wants to do right by his aggrieved mother (Stella Inda), but is lead astray by El Jaibo (Roberto Cobo), a diabolical older boy whose larger physical build, snake-like cunning and total lack of scruples make him a natural leader, in the Darwinian sense. Try as Pedro does to straighten out and overcome his dismal lot, he cannot dodge the fiendish, indefatigable Jaibo, or evade his own tragic fate.

Sidestepping the clichés of the "juvenile delinquent film" - cloying sentimentality and a neat resolution via altruistic intervention - and the melodramatic excess typical of Mexican productions of the period, Buñuel's account strikes a distinctive balance between psychologically-charged realism and the surrealism he helped popularize twenty years earlier. In the fashion of the so-called neorealist films that dominated European cinemas at the time, the staging is completely authentic, shot on location in the most wretched districts of Mexico City with locals serving as extras, but here there's little of the neorealists' moralistic messaging. Cruelties, from child abuse to murder, occur regularly, and are treated by the camera as they are by the characters, as perfectly natural acts that will be repeated again and again endlessly, marked only by a cut or fade to black.

Buñuel does occasionally tread into the realm of the metaphysical, and revert to his usual phantasmagoric tricks; there's a haunting dream sequence that inverts 'Zéro de conduite's ecstatic slow-motion revolt, and a primal symbolism that runs throughout, every chicken, pigeon and mongrel dog acquiring a latent significance. Still, the focus remains on the very real lives of the hapless youngsters. Thanks to the director's utterly truthful approach, we may not pity or pass judgement on the boys, but we're not likely to forget them either.

Review - Entranced Earth (1967)

This surreal, sweltering vision of subtropical political purgatory from Glauber Rocha is the most direct work in the Brazilian filmmaker's ecstatic oeuvre. He trades the blasted historical hinterlands of his 1963 breakthrough 'Black God, White Devil' for the fictional coastal republic of Eldorado (a thinly disguised Rio de Janeiro), where idealistic poet Paulo (Jardel Filho) is gripped by dual crises. He can't decide whether he'd better serve the revolutionary cause as an artist or a journalist, and is torn between loyalty to two antithetical candidates seeking power: the vainglorious right-wing Diaz (Paulo Autran), a former mentor backed by foreign interests, and populist upstart Vieira (José Lewgoy), sympathetic to the will of the people but equally susceptible to corruption, or worse, impotence. Entangled in intrigue and finding no simple route to change, he opts for armed resistance, the only recourse left to the artist, or so the director appears to suggest. Spun through Rocha's delirious, dissonant prism, his homeland is more a morally bankrupt Sodom than a golden utopia. As if symptomatic of a pathological hypocrisy that he wishes to expose, practically every image and sound presented seems at odds with its complement; introspective shots of solitary figures in nature are juxtaposed with hysterical crowd scenes, realistic locations give way to gothic set pieces, classical music cues are intercut with machine-gun fire, elegant poetry is laid over frenzied montage. Rocha's indictment of the political morass at home is so relentless and wide-ranging, it's no wonder it was banned by the Brazilian government upon release, and that just a few short years later he'd be directing his incendiary films in exile.

Review - Seven Men From Now (1956)

Notable for drawing the unlikely praise of cinema theoreticians like André Bazin and Paul Schrader, Budd Boetticher's lean, low-budget western packs a loftier punch than the average cowboy revenge picture. Randolph Scott stars as the steely Ben Stride, a former sheriff tracking seven bandits who murdered his wife during a gold heist, a turn of events for which the lawman blames himself. Accompanied by a couple seeking passage to California (Gail Russell and Walter Reed) and a criminal-turned-tenuous ally (Lee Marvin, slick as oil and in top form), Stride crosses a treacherous outback en route to his inevitable showdown with the killers, and presumably, his absolution. The film's rarefied appeal can be attributed to its protagonist's atypically internalized conflict - a moral tug-of-war played out beneath the surface, revealed by minute gestures and terse dialogue - as well as the stark staging, which underscores the archetypal struggle of morally fickle men against an unforgiving elemental backdrop. Boetticher and screenwriter Burt Kennedy don't reinvent western tropes as much as sublimate them; dualistic heroes and villains are portrayed as facets of the same character, plot twists evince a cruelly absurd universe at play, the quest for vengeance becomes a pilgrimage to grace. Of course, no amount of transcendental cachet and auteurist angling can replace old-fashioned thrills, but fortunately for the casual filmgoer, there are a few of those too.

Review - The All-Around Reduced Personality aka Redupers (1978)

Helke Sander's first and best film, made in West Germany in 1977, is a harrowing yet heartening portrait of a woman colliding with the glass ceiling in slow-motion. The woman (played by Sander) is Edda Chiemnyjewski, a photographer and single mother juggling artistic ambitions with work and parental duties, and the ceiling is an actual physical barrier. The Berlin Wall, a looming presence established in a long tracking shot that opens the film, effectively embodies the impediments and partitions that Edda and her all-female photography collective must navigate. Their planned project, a series involving the wall and the citizens on either side, is repeatedly rejected for being too political, and not reflective of traditional "women's issues." The runaround continues, culminating at a particularly exasperating gallery reception, a gauntlet of condescension that leaves Edda sickened, figuratively and literally. Rather than give in to frustration, Sander seeks solace in the ritualistic pleasures of the photographer's craft, specifically the repetitive, strangely hypnotic processes of developing and printing. She also interjects alleviating humor, via a steady stream of wry, intelligent dialogue, and episodes that highlight the subtle absurdity of the workaday balancing act. Sander's films, as ingenious as they are, still have yet to receive the consideration they deserve. In her first go-around, she exhibits the saint-like equanimity required to continue creating in lieu of that consideration.

Review - Radio On (1979)

A laconic loner traverses a bleak, post-industrial England via automobile in Chris Petit's moody, monochrome road movie, the first feature from the critic turned director. After learning that his brother has died under mysterious, possibly sordid circumstances, late-night radio DJ Robert (David Beams) drives from London to Bristol in search of answers, unaccompanied but for a tastefully selected stack of cassettes from Bowie, Kraftwerk and Devo. While he finds little in the way of an explanation, he does encounter a series of forlorn characters - including a disturbed army deserter fleeing service in Ireland (Andrew Byatt) and a German woman searching for her estranged daughter (Lisa Kreuzer) - that personify the despondency and doubt gripping late-70's Britain, soon to be exacerbated by impending Thatcherism. An overt cinephile, Petit packs his debut with visual and thematic allusions to decidedly un-British arts films like 'Two-Lane Blacktop,' 60's Antonioni, and most prominently, the road movies of Wim Wenders, who, not coincidentally, serves as a producer here. The music-obsessed, highway-bound protagonist could easily have drifted out of one of Wenders' psychic landscapes, but Petit still deserves a great deal of credit. No English film before or since has skated the line between dreary realism and arthouse aesthetics with such easy elegance, or punk insouciance.