Lola (1961)

Saw Lola, a film by Jacques Demy, who is most famous for directing The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, a musical about a woman reuniting with her long-lost lover not altogether happily.  In keeping with that film's theme of love sort of vs life, this film is about doomed, innocent love, juxtaposed with the trappings of tawdry sleeze.

The film follows a couple of people as they meet and interact with each other.  There's the titular Lola who is a cabaret dancer, Roland who is a bored young man with nothing but time on his hands, Frankie, an American sailor in town for some fun, and young Cecile, a girl in a hurry to grow up with her single mother.  These characters - show girls, sailors, bored handsome young men, teenage schoolgirls, are the archetypes of pornography and there's even a reference to the novel Justine by the Marquis De Sade.  Despite all of this however, everything is kept mostly innocent and kind of sweet.  It may have been quite risque for its time but it's tame enough now to see with one's mother.

The theme of the film is doomed love.  The prostitute Lola hopelessly loves her one-time boyfriend.  The innocent young man Roland burns a candle for Lola, and the schoolgirl has a crush on the sailor who treats her with the restrained affection of a father who she never had.  It's all very surprisingly sweet, a sort of inversion of most of these stories involving the sex trade.  Instead of moralistically ending on a down note, the film mines sincerity and hope out of these depths.  As one character neatly sums things up: "there's some happiness to be had just in hoping for happiness."

The film is French and filmed in the 1960s.  It's an interesting film, but was not quite what I was in the mood for, alas.  I was too young and snobby to really enjoy Umbrellas of Cherbourg and (alas) I think this one also missed me by a bit.  I enjoyed the uplifting attitude of the film, and I guess I can recommend it to anyone out there who has a hankering for 60s-era non-new wave, but was a bit dusty for me - a bit homework-ish.

A Moment of Innocence (1996)

Saw A Moment of Innocence (1996) a chilly, slow, fascinating film by Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf.  It strongly reminded me of Close-Up, another Irianian film which similarly plays with reality and make-believe in weird, post-modern way.  I feel they're leap-frogging the movies-about-movies of Fellini and Truffaut and jumping straight into a reality-television-inspired morass of reality and artifice.  A dizzying kayfabe which is impossible to untangle.  It's not the most gripping, but it's very intersting.

This film is about a ex-policeman who wants to become an actor.  So, he goes to Makhmalbaf (the actual director of this film) to ask for a part.  Makhmalbaf decides to film a re-enactment of the time when, as a young man, Makhmalbaf had stabbed this policeman.  So, they cast young actors as young-Makhmalbaf and young-policeman and start to work establishing these young actors as clones of the actual men: they have similar ideals and attitudes, they naturally fall into re-creating the conversations the real versions of their characters must have had.

The film hovers in this arch, shadowy realm of not being real and not being totally imaginary.  Scenes are re-created over and over, from different perspectives, sometimes even with the director of this film shouting instructions from behind the camera.  There's a scene early on where the cop talks with one of his friends about the film.  "Will you be a good guy or a bad guy?" They ask.  This is a natural question, but this is an autobiography - there are no good guys and bad guys, only different perspectives.

The film ends on a sublime, lyrical freeze-frame, just before the stabbing (perhaps.)  The story of what happened is muddled, complicated by the recreation.  The question of who was innocent, of what was the moment of innocence suddenly has many conflicting and reflecting answers.  I really enjoyed the film.

Love, Simon (2018)

Saw Love, Simon, a fairly heartwarming film about a gay teen navigating coming out and highschool.  I really liked it, but it was also very hard to watch sometimes.  Being gay, any time I watch a film about gay guys, it's a lot more visceral for me.  Normally, there's a bit of remove for me in romance films and I have to sort of translate in my head,  projecting my empathy over a slightly wider gap than most people.  It's not a big deal usually, but the gay films seem a little too close, uncomfortably real.  So, the romantic scenes made me cry, and the awkward scenes (of which there's many!) had me shouting at the TV, horror-movie style.  I really enjoyed it, but I'll bet it's not high on anyone's "must watch" list.

The film takes place somewhere warm where you can wear a hoodie outdoors during Christmas.  The attractive protagonist Simon goes to an enormous school where he hangs out with a clique of similarly attractive, friendly, decent, popular kids who have enough freedom to just fuck off to a house party some night.  He lives in a mansion with his dotingly permissive and successful parents and he begins the film by narrating that he's "just like you" only gay.  Ok.

This is standard John Hughes-type stuff though (and this is a very John Hughes-type movie).  It should be regarded as escapism and wish-fulfillment and as a simple way of making sure only the central struggle with sexuality is the focus.  The film is half for adult gays who want a window into a kinder universe and half for struggling teens, trying to figure themselves out and to judge when to commit publicly.  It's a very kindly world which does not actually exist for many kids, but it's there to grant wishes and to show what could be - it's not there to be a documentary.

Anyway, the film is very standard, teen-movie stuff.  There's drama and big shouty show-downs and bullies and parents who just don't understand!  And yeah, I recognize all of this, but oh my god I loved it!  It was so sweet and so nice and it just melted my heart.  I make no claims to objectivity - this movie was for me.

Without Name (2016)

Saw Without Name (2016), a psychological horror about a land surveyor who starts to lose himself in a wild, mossy, tree-shrouded forest that he's been assigned to survey.  The film is full of lovely creeping dread and sinister imagery.  There's not a lot of jumps or axe-wielding maniacs, but the film is very nervy and pretty which I like better anyway.

The film is clearly about the tension between nature and human society.  The protagonist's home is stark greys and whites, looking like a particularly severe Ikea show room.  He pauses to look at a plant growing out of a crack in cement.  In addition to the theme of society vs nature, there's the theme of society vs human nature.  In addition to plastic and concrete, we have surly teenagers, nagging wives, bleeping macbooks.  Wouldn't it be better just to wander in the welcoming green of the woods, forever lost and lost forever?

The film is relatively straightforward.  There's overwhelming, psychedelic imagery and gobs of atmosphere, but it's a scary story in the vein of The Shining: a man losing his grip on reality in a strange land.  I enjoyed the emphasis on nature and the timeliness of the climate-related paranoia.  Soon enough, we may be much more at the mercy of nature than we were before.  I for one hope I can get a few more films in before the water wars, of course.

The House (2022)

Saw The House, which is a piece of film on Netflix that Netflix presents as a movie but which is confusingly listed as a TV show on imdb.  Whatever this thing is, it's currently a trio of stop-motion animated short films about people being consumed by their house.  I think it's supposed to be the same house, but it might not be - it's not part of the plot really.

The first short is about the house's creation and was amazing.  I like films that are animated and I like stories about evil houses, so I was expecting greatness and this first film delivered: changing hallways, obsessive exploration, Faustian deviltry - it has it all!  The film is a cautionary tale about the pursuit of status as symbolized by the house.  We follow a poor family who agree to let a wealthy man build a house on their land and in exchange must live in the house.  As the house grows around them and their mysterious benefactor gains control, they lose sight of themselves and their roots.  A chilly little story which I enjoyed immensely.

The second film was about a mouse-man who is working on rehabilitating the house with the end goal of flipping it.  Unfortunately, the house has become infested with fur beetles (fictional creatures which seem to be animal-world analogues for bed bugs or something.)  Despite his best efforts to keep the house looking fancy and impressive, things keep breaking and the fur beetles keep showing up.  Again, there's some delicious obsession on display, however I couldn't help but feel bad for the increasingly desperate main character, which sort of spoiled the fun.  The theme here I think is of parasitism.  The main mouse guy is trying to find some wealthy family to profit off of his labor, but is instead stuck with lowlier vermin who are far more appreciative of his work.

The final film follows a cat-woman who now owns the house.  Some sort of disaster has left the world covered in slowly-rising water, except for the hill-top upon which the house sits.  The cat-woman has a dream of refurbishing the house so she can live in it.  Alas, she's living in the past, both literally (in an ancient house) and figuratively (ie: living as though world were not water-logged).  This story is about her moving on and learning to grow with the world, accepting instead of fighting change.  I felt this was the weakest of the three films, but it is the most positive and thus logical to end on.

The trio of films taken together were a little disappointing to me.  I hoped they would all be like the first short: sinister and full of twisting, ever-changing, inscrutable hallways and architecture.  They became more gentle as they went on though, the last one being almost folksy.  It was alright, but fell somewhat short of my expectations.