1991-2000

Six outwardly average individuals have elaborate fetishes they indulge with surreptitious care. A mousy letter carrier makes dough balls she grotesquely ingests before bed. A shop clerk fixates on a TV news reader while he builds a machine to massage and masturbate him. One of his customers makes an elaborate chicken costume for a voodoo-like scene with a doll resembling his plump neighbor. She, in turn, has a doll that resembles him, which she whips and dominates in an abandoned church. The TV news reader has her own fantasy involving carp. Her husband, who is indifferent to her, steals materials to fashion elaborate artifacts that he rubs, scrapes and rolls across his body.
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L’Amour, L’Argent, L’Amour (2000) was a hit in Germany this year, with the press praising everything from the actors to the director and plot. The titles were initially alluring, red and intercut with time-lapse firework flashes of a city on New Year’s Eve. Helped by a restless camera, the viewer soon realises that it isn’t going to be a “sit down and relax” type of experience.

David, an unemployed scrap metal wimp with his arm in plaster (Florian Stetter) and Marie, an impish, cutsie prostitute, (Sabine Timoteo) meet and spontaneously decide to leave town together. Normally couples elope romantically into the sunset or run adventurously away together, but Philip Groening’s L’Amour, L’Argent, L’Amour (2000) this couple drive off into the snowy, bleak landscape. Copious shots of roads at night ensue (for this is a “road movie”).Read More »

Quote:
The House was reviewed a little less favorably than Bartas’ earlier films (regular cinemagoers having given up long ago), but personally I found it his most beautiful film yet.

Bartas does tend to repeat himself, it’s true. Reviewers love his grim shadowscapes, shot in B/W, of anonymous, more or less lonely, drunk or disheveled men and women stumbling through a haze of cold forests, smoky houses and city wastelands in seemingly arbitrarily fashion – but even they get, I assume, weary of it.

(Contrary to what you might think based on the above, there is nothing gothic about Bartas’ depressed realities; and he himself insists, whenever somebody dares suggest a socio-political interpretation, there’s nothing Soviet about it either. It’s existential. No matter, to me his ‘The Corridor’ still serves as a brilliant visual summary of the comfortless, hopeless human condition of the former Soviet Union).
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synopsis
Don McKellar wrote and directed this comedy-drama about the last night of the world, part of the 12-film Arte series of movies about the Millennium. Set in Toronto, Patrick (McKellar) endures a faux Christmas celebration with his family while Sandra (Sandra Oh) tries to get across town to commit suicide with her husband, a gas company employee Duncan (David Cronenberg). Meanwhile, Craig (Callum Keith Rennie) hopes to achieve sexual satisfaction with several women on his list. Still mourning his dead wife, Patrick plans his last moments alone, until he and Sandra crosspaths. Shown in the Directors Fortnight section at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival.Read More »

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Quote:
this poem of inexorable yearning, people look out, up, away from their little spot in the universe. The snowy miniature tableaux of boxy houses, dray horses and children tugging sleds seem oddly comforting in contrast to the exposed heights of the town bridge, the church tower and the mountaintop. This quiet meditation lulls you, then sweeps you up into the heavens.

After we finished shooting “Earth of the blind” I was holding the impression of man climbing a big chimney for two years. How does the world look like from such empyrean? What holds man between earth and sky? How does the world look like from roofs of churches? These questions were the starting point.Read More »

Quote:
Agnes Varda and Jacques Demy, who together and separately had been making films for 30 years, began a new one in April, 1990. It was about his childhood memories. If you have seen Demy’s “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” a musical set in a garage and featuring singing mechanics, you may have guessed that Demy grew up as the son of an auto mechanic. “Umbrellas” won all the awards – the prize at Cannes, the foreign language Oscar – and Demy made such others as “Lola” and “Donkey Skin,” often centering around the songs he remembered from his youth.Read More »

Barrio = neighbourhood

Awards: 11 wins & 7 nominations

Javi, Rai and Manu go to the same school and live in the same area, out of town, where there isn’t much to do. Stuck in their boring neighbourhood, they look on with envy at the massive summer exodus. They have a lot of free time on their hands; too much. And the devil usually finds work for idle hands.Read More »

From Stephen Holden review in NYT: “In his unsettling urban panorama, “The Town Is Quiet,” the director Robert Guédiguian invests the French port city of Marseille with the same epic sense of drama that infused Robert Altman’s “Nashville.” Raw, wrenching and more starkly tragic than Mr. Altman’s satire, “The Town Is Quiet” evokes a similar vision of a city as a teeming organism in violent, spasmodic flux.Read More »