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Paris today. Simon works as psychologist in human resources department of petrochemical corporation. When Management gets him to investigate one of the factory’s executives, Simon’perception goes disturbingly chaotic and cloudy. The experience affects his body, his mind, his personal life and his sensibility. The calm assurance that made him such a rigorous technician starts to falter.Read More »
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A peeping-tom academic (Michael Lonsdale) and a hunchbacked prizefighter (Jean-Bernard Guillard) find nocturnal rapprochement in their shared inability to sleep. Bottomless philosophical discussions take the men further afield of reality, and they eventually decide to rape a pregnant woman named Violette (Olimpia Carlisi), who then throws herself into the Seine—only to return time and again in new, horrifying forms, including the spectral visage of her son (Ruiz’s child alter ego Melvil Poupaud). One of the director’s most confrontational visions, The Insomniac on the Bridge is a barbed avant-garde meditation on trauma, rationalization, and delirium—an underside that Ruiz, as always, reminds us is clinging to the crust of day-to-day reality.Read More »
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When you think of art house directors you probably think of some of the more famous filmmakers like Werner Herzog (Aguirre, the Wrath of God), Peter Greenaway (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover) or Alejandro Jodorowsky (Holy Mountain). Someone you may not know is French writer and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet. Robbe-Grillet was part of the “nouveau roman” novelist movement which diverted from the classical style of writing and deviated from the norm with experimental prose. The same could be said with his film Glissements progressifs du plaisir (literal translation is “Gradual shifts of pleasure”) aka Successive Slidings of Pleasure where he blends dreamlike visuals with eroticism and, oddly, nunsploitation.Read More »
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Leave it to an old master to strip a complex question down to its basics, leave aside all the anxiety and handwringing, and discover compassion as a basic reflex, a core value of a Europe few seem to recall. Michael Sicinski for Cargo: “Ermanno Olmi’s The Cardboard Village stars Michael Lonsdale (fresh from his turn in Xavier Beauvois’s Of Gods and Men) as an elderly Italian priest in the final days before his retirement, watching as his church is deconsecrated, the pews pushed into a corner by a forklift, Christ deposed from the cross by a crane. In the night, the priest takes to the pulpit and addresses the absent congregation. ‘Where have you all gone?’ he asks? Unbeknownst to him, the town’s North African immigrants, hunted by the carabinieri, take up in the back storeroom. Eventually they build a tent city in the empty nave. The younger priest (Rutger Hauer) tries to convince the old man that it is too dangerous to harbor the refugees. ‘When charity is a risk,’ he says, ‘is precisely when it is necessary to offer charity.'”Read More »