The Devil Is a Woman (1935)

Saw The Devil Is a Woman, another film based on the same source material as The Obscure Object Of Desire.  Whereas that film frames the war of the sexes as being analogous to class struggle, this one is far more straight-forward.  We have a scheming prostitute vs a dignified and imposing officer.  It's not so much about class as it is about a woman behaving terribly and getting away with everything.  I'm inclined to dislike the prostitute character, but then again the officer is no prize either.  He is goaded beyond endurance, but beyond endurance lies domestic assault apparently.

So it's just a film about terrible people behaving terribly.  Oh dear.  The prostitute is played by Marlene Dietrich, who is always a delight to watch as long as she's being bad.  She's fun in this and interesting to watch but she only seems to have one trick: to stamp her foot and declare that whoever she's trying to manipulate doesn't really lover her.  It's so silly!

The film plays as a black comedy, satirizing the lengths people will go through to torment each other when a relationship goes bad.  There's comic business involving the cops and cackling madams and schemes to bilk the officer out of his money.  The plot is quite bleak but it seems played for laughs.  I am either too sophisticated or not sophisticated enough to laugh, but it's pleasant in its own quaint way.

Tale of Tales (2015)

Saw Tale of Tales, a very fanciful film based on a trio of Italian fairytales.  The film is very pretty, very sumptuous, and full of fairytale strangeness.  It's a sort of deconstruction however unlike Shrek, say, this one is overly serious, almost dour.  A queen is obsessed with keeping an eye on her child.  She is played as controlling and obsessive.  She is not a cypher, but a flawed human being living in a time of magic and miracles.

The film is sensual, full of rich colors and dark shadows.  It's got very little dialogue which helps to underscore the universal, mythic flavor of the stories.  I have to admit that whatever deep themes or allegorical, universal truths the film has to offer up passed me by.  Like fairy tales, this film was very strange, very creative, but that was kind of all.  It had the raw feeling of dreams - something that will stick in your mind, but which may not change how you feel about a thing.  An oblique addition to the conversation.

I enjoyed the movie, but it's very singular.  I wouldn't recommend it except as a vehicle for seeing strange things.  It's very dark but not in a silly, goth-y kind of way.  It's an interesting, pretty film.

Teorema (1968)

Saw Teorema (AKA Theorem).  It was directed by Pier Pasolini, he of the Salo fame.  This film focuses on a middle-class family who welcomes a mysterious male guest into their house.  The maid is fascinated by him, opening the film with a suicide attempt in an effort to attract his notice.  Next, the son of the family finds himself strangely attracted to the smiling guest.  Then the mother, daughter, and even the father are seduced by this man.  He awakens strange, intense passions within them and then leaves the film entirely and leaves the family to deal with the fallout of his visit.

Before the credits, we see cameramen interviewing factory workers, talking to them about political revolution and how the middle class, now free from religion and beginning to free itself from capitalism, must now empathize with the common man.  We establish the film as taking place in the post-modern intellectual sphere we find ourselves in now: the church is corrupt, the government is corrupt, soon even intelligentsia itself will be revealed to be corrupt.  What role can we play now to give our lives meaning?

This film sort of absurdly posits sexual/romantic experiences as a source of meaning.  The free love revolution was close at hand and we spend half of the film watching the various characters deal with their romantic involvement with the mysterious guest.  Some of the family it destroys.  The mother is awoken to the emptiness in her life, but is given nothing to fill that void with.  Then again, others of the family find transcendence and the profoundest sort of meaning as a result.

The film is spare and strange.  It's an art film first, with heightened artificiality.  There's inexplicably silent sequences, clumsy overdubbing, and cuts to some hellish black desert.  (Apparently this film is part of Pasolini's "Mythical" cycle - perhaps this connects to the other films.  Pigsty (of the same cycle) seems to feature this desert in the trailer))  The various seductions are fun in a smutty sort of way, but I was gratified to see the fall-out play out as well.  Many absurdists are content to undermine the middle class by punching below the belt, but I felt this film had somewhat more compassion.  Not only are the hypocrisies of this middle-class family exposed, but then they must live with it.  Interesting.

Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022)

Saw Three Thousand Years of Longing, a fabulous film about a woman who researches storytelling who finds a genuine genie in a bottle while travelling.  The bulk of the film takes place in flashbacks as the genie tells his story of imprisonment and granting wishes.  It's a sumptuous and pretty film.  It reminded me of The Fall (which is one of my favorite films) only somewhat more upbeat.

The point of the film is to see strange, fairy-tale-like scenarios play out with courtesans and generals.  The visuals are eye-popping and, even when we spend some time back in England, near the end of the film, the visuals are still amped, brining us a heightened, fantastical feel.  I was most interested in the dynamic between the woman and the genie.  She's never really sure that he's not some kind of monkey's-paw style ironical granter of wishes.  Very often the wishes that are granted work out badly for the wisher or for the genie or both.

This delightful ambiguity resonates with an internet theory which didn't occur to me but which I think adds spice to the film: that the genie is a figment of the woman's imagination.  There are many connections between the characters in the genie's past and the woman's own life.  Not being able to tell if the genie is really real or not adds some level of magic to the film: that not only could we madden ourselves to the point of believing in magic, but it may benefit us in the end too!

An adorable film.

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)

Saw The Adventures of Robin Hood, a technicolor spectacular starring Errol Flynn, the Tom Cruise of his time.  The film is not particularly stirring, but it is very pleasantly shot.  Technicolor was new at the time and although much of the film is shot in the woods, they had not gotten bored with woods as they actually are at that time.  So, despite much effort to make the woods of California look authentically like the woods of England, it mostly winds up looking like someone's backyard.  It's a strange element of naturalism in an otherwise extremely stagey and mannered film.Indeed, the laid-back nature of Robin Hood coupled with the naturalistic nature scenes made me think of films of the 70s, with their preoccupation with the individual vs society.

The film cannot be mistaken for a film from the 70s however.  There's a lot of bursting out in hearty laughs and quaint discussions of love for that.  The characters all do that stage thing where they seem to be shouting at each other all of the time.  It's a little silly, but that's the 30s for you.  Film was still relatively young.

Anyway, the film is very quaint, very sweet.  It's got a lot of swashbuckling and action scenes, but its heart is in the scenes where Robin laughingly parlays his wit with Prince John or with the Sheriff of Nottingham, tricking them and answering their verbal traps with cunning repartee.  That's the bit I liked best anyway.  The film is a romp of Robin outwitting the unjust state, and who can dislike that?

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (2022)

Saw Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, a parody bio-pic about the rise of Weird Al, from his humble youth growing up in a factory town, to high-school where he begins to sneak out to wild polka parties and has a fateful run-in with a slick accordion salesman.  Once his talent is recognized in a dive bar frequented by Dr Demento, he's catapulted to fame and glory, ultimately winning the prestigious Perhaps Not Technically The Best, But Arguably The Most Famous Accordion Player In An Extremely Specific Genre Of Music Award.  Truly, an inspiring film.

The film contains many parodies of the musical bio-pic genre, spoofing Boogie Nights and The Doors' LSD-fueled tours (and wow, Daniel Radcliff (who plays Weird Al) is jacked!)  As you might be able to gather from the above, it is not exactly faithful to the truth, but it is entertainingly nutty and funny in a wholesome sort of way.  There's a lot of great comedy mined from the film being unreliable in its narration.  Also, we get great scenes of Al "discovering" parody concepts for various songs.

Being a comedy, the film is somewhat slight.  We don't plumb the depths of the human condition and we don't grapple with man's inhumanity with man, but we get some silly hijinks and some laughs at the hubris of a man taking liberties with his own story, and that's pretty good.  No regrets.  Pretty fun!

Three Colours: Red (1994)

Saw Three Colours: Red, the last in the trilogy.  This film is concerned with brotherhood.  It's much more visceral and dramatic than the other two films and, I felt, had a much more interesting soundtrack.  It follows Valentine, a model and student, versus a retired judge (who never gets a name despite getting second billing in the cast.)  Optimistic Valentine believes that people are basically decent and good whereas the judge has seen enough misery to conclude that people are basically selfish and cruel.

The film plays out slowly, involving various other folks in its plot, the camera mildly roving the streets, following a person here, drifting into a window there.  The theme of brotherhood seems obscure to me, except in the broadest sense of us all being brothers (in a way.)

The most compelling part of the film is the slow philosophical argument played out between the two main characters.  Luckily for me, they settle their differences with grand dramatic gestures: sending one an invite to a fashion show, or adopting a dog.  Such drama!  Such pathos!

We never really get into why the judge is this way.  He references some old love affair, but the judges cynical malaise is endemic on the internet, where to be outraged is to be aware, where to be disillusioned is to be wise.  My understanding is that such misery is often idealism that is curdled and gone sour: a belief that since one's life is not like a rom-com then either you have been lied to or cheated.  The solution presented in the film of unwavering decency and quiet outrage in the face of leering cruelty does not scale.  It supposes that there is more optimism in the world than cynicism and I'm not sure this is the case.  It would have been better, perhaps, to have the model out-clever the judge by pointing out that people are both good and bad and that if you watch only the bad, then that's all you'll see.  But maybe this is just cheap sophistry.  It's a difficult problem.

Anyway the film is pretty good, very dramatic and with a few really dazzling scenes (when the law student is on the balcony, wow!) the score was banging and it was a nice, wholesome, uplifting film.  A good note to end on!

Three Colours: White (1994)

Saw Three Colours: White, the second in the three colors trilogy.  This one was about equality.  It's less staid than the first one, more satisfying and straightforward in its primary plot, however a little more obscure in how it connects to its color theme of equality.

the film follows Karol, a hairdresser, who opens the film being divorced by his wife.  She leaves him without possessions or home, cruelly leaving him on the streets, somehow freezing his bank cards, gloating about winning his property in court, and even threatening to frame him for arson when he tries to come back.  She asks him "Do I make you afraid?"  He is re-born, all but naked, into the world, re-born by this trauma.  The rest of the film shows him slowly climbing out of this hole, becoming his own master once more.  The film's ending brings the theme home in a very clear way, but you should see it yourself.

I enjoyed the film.  It was more visceral and straightforward than the first one I saw, but it is still a Kieslowski film.  He's more into subtlety than histrionics and this film contains a lot of unusual plot points and slow payoffs.  The theme of equality is sort of subverted (as I've come to expect!) but it's not layered into the narrative the same way it was with Blue.  I don't know.  I liked this one okay, it just felt a little thinner than the last one, a little more on the surface.  Maybe I'm just missing the depths?

Three Colours: Blue (1993)

Saw Three Colours: Blue (1993), a typically knotty film by Kieslowski, he of the Decalogue fame.  This film series, the colours trilogy deals with the themes symbolized by the three colors of the French flag.  This film, Blue, is related to freedom.

As we have learned recently here in the US, freedom is a tricky thing: there is a "freedom to" and a "freedom from".  This film follows a widow whose husband and child were tragically and suddenly killed.  The widow is very suddenly "free from" and she retreats into this world of unmoored, empty freedom.  She finds herself needing to remake herself, rediscovering who she is outside of her family.  This is not a feminist empowerment film, but a film about loss and how the world has a way of filling the voids in your life.  It is half kind and half cruel.

We see images of life continuing around the widow's island of solitude.  She swims in a pool which is suddenly invaded by many screaming children.  She refuses to participate in a petition and becomes remarkable by not participating.  Even in the retreat, she is running into life again.

And of course there's a whole mess of blue symbolism.  In addition to the swimming pool that she luxuriates in, there's a blue plastic decoration she hangs on to.  Her husband's papers are wrapped in a blue envelope and her daughter's last candy was a blue lollypop.  Frequently there are scenes of her face with glints of blue light playing over it, often when she's resisting human connection.

The film is interesting.  It's not very visceral or exciting, but it sets up little puzzles and slowly and subtly but only rarely pays them off.  This is a film for thinking about and talking about.  It's not obscurantist, so there is a sort of solution layed out in the imdb trivia, but the engine of this film is in its meditation over loss and isolation, which is a freedom of a kind.