Late August, Early September – 1998

I'm always complaining that few men authors or writer/directors seem capable of writing full, multi-layered women. Olivier Assayas proves the exception and, if you haven't seen it,  CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA proves the apotheosis of his insight into women characters and his skill at evoking them through conversation and through silences. In this multi-character, swirling, intimate, almost wholly conversational picture, every woman, save one, is as real and rich as the men. And when the film ends, it's the women you remember.

The exception, weirdly, is Virginie Ledoyen. She's more a collection of tropes, a directorial fantasy who never seems quite real. Is that because she's biggest star among the actresses? Did Assayas not know how to treat her as a complex human, as he does every other character? Ledoyen never evolves past a an object of desire with a flashpoint temper and little depth.

Despite this one shortfall, the picture grew and grew on me as the story progressed. At first it seemed only a roundelay of shifting lovers among a coterie of friends who just happen to be the best looking, most charismatic and self-contained people in Paris.

But their conversations proved natural and credible in pacing and in ever-present mutual misunderstanding. This is literary, not in a Eric Rohmer arch way, but in a Sally Rooney compassionate way: every character has such profound needs and none will admit to them, no matter how dire their emergencies. It hit me after about an hour - out of two - what extraordinary portraits Assayas was painting. The film is heartfelt and true and immersive.

The visuals have an off-hand, naturalist beauty featuring Assayas' constantly moving camera and his cutting off motion and emotion, which no one can equal. 

Mia Hansen-Løve - director of the hilarious, bittersweet BERGMAN ISLAND, among others - makes her acting debut at 17. She plays the way too young almost-lover of the character around whom all the others revolve. She's a charismatic, magical presence.

Ilya Muromets/The Sword and the Dragon - 1956

Absolute beyond the beyond Russian mythic batshittery - operatic, dreamlike, psychedelic, ridiculous, grandiose, poetic, violent, magical, gorgeous, incredible special and in-camera effects, exquisite 3-strip Technicoloresque palette with costumes, sets and scale -100,000 extras! – as only the state-supported coffers of Mosfilm could provide.

Will likely only increase your contempt for – and refusal to be swayed by – CGI or shooting on video at all, for that matter.

Writer/director Alexandr Ptushko did it all with puppets, film magic, lighting and complete and utter belief in his complete and utterly deranged mission. Weirdly compelling and irresistable, like being carried along in someone else's dreams. The crude special effects prove convincing, and the scenes using those 100,000 extras raise the art of the possible to the celestial. Those scenes prove the most dreamlike, immersive and incredible, but...

Cultural Note: This is a Rus-adoring product of the barely post-Stalinist Soviet Union. So the heroes and heroines are enormous strapping bob-nosed, blue-eyed Aryans and the invaders they battle are demonic semi-humans, all small and bandy-legged and dark. The worst villain, the lying, cringing, back-stabbing, greedy traitor, has a gigantic fake nose - the only fake-seeming effect in this wonderhouse - walks stooped over and constantly rubs his hands together while whining and complaining: Shylock - pure anti-Semitic caricature and a pure portrait of this picture's time and place.

Drive, He Said - 1971

An apparently forgotten 50 year-old artifact: Jack Nicholson's directorial debut. With the author, he adapted a terrific hipster graveyard-humor novel about basketball in all its poetry (my jam ENTIRELY) slamming head-on into Vietnam.

Bruce Dern is a perfectly modulated psycho head coach and Karen Black, at her most garishly insanely beautiful, for once gets to play a character as intelligent as she really is. Too bad she always had to play po'buckers and psychos – she was always so much smarter than that. And Black gets to showcase her perfect comic timing. She more than holds her own with screenwriter Robert Towne, of all people, playing a cuckolded professor.

This is back when Nicholson still embraced his complex sensibility and sought ambiguity in the narrative - I mean, think of the deflating cartoon that was GOING WEST. Here he also got to be as smart as he really is.

At about the 75% mark the focus unfortunately shifts from the b-ball star to his psycho roommate, which leads to a truly harrowing - and possibly triggering - attempted rape. Despite this unsettling sequence, Nicholson proves a master of stoned pacing, in the manner of Monte Hellman. Though the film at first seems kinda off-hand or even improv, it's beautifully structured and a true portrait of the endish of the '60's.

I have the Criterion DVD so I hope it's on the channel. There's actually nothing quite like it...

PS: At one point the lead b-ball guy climbs a huge stone wall to preach his love for Karen Black. There's only one enormous graffito on the entire wall: HD STANTON

The Wretches - 1960

Robert Hossein is a singular, highly controlled, deranged stylist. That is, his style is utterly deranged and perfectly controlled. 

THE WRETCHES evokes the original THE HANDMAIDEN; there's an innocent young girl who's an unknowing and passive-aggressive catalyst; it all takes place in one locale - a groovy "modern" apartment set at the apparent end of the world; and the dwelling becomes a character in its own right. As in THE HANDMAIDEN, you cannot believe anyone could shoot one set from so many and so evocative angles.

Hossein is also perverse AF – drowning in voyuerism, jealousy and suppressed and overt sexuality. There's a party/almost orgy that makes LA DOLCE VITA look like MARY POPPINS.

THE WRETCHES has something to do with Hossein fetishizing America, mostly through cars and Coca Cola bottles, but given that he fetishizes getting a glass of water, what that means is hard to say.

All this romance, desire, parental meddling, astonishing camera movement, rich emotion conveyed in silence and big American cars takes place in some unholy wormhole of Jean-Pierre Melville, Sam Fuller and what used to be called "women's melodrama."

That's an awe-struck compliment, by the way. A big one.

Hossein is a master; it's a shame he's not better known and that his films are so difficult to stream or buy. BLONDE IN A WHITE CAR - still my fave - is on DVD.

Cemetery Without Crosses - 1969

Unlike almost all other Spaghetti Westerns. But if I tell you why, that'll blow the plot.

Robert Hossein brings his obsessive pacing and emotion to the genre, with strange, compelling results. 

Playing the "hero," Hossein wears his pistol in the most awkward possible position. Before every gunfight, he pulls one black glove onto his non-shooting hand, fetishizing the gunfight and, bless his heart, evoking The Music Machine.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OhY4ipNbPY

But gunfights are not Hossein's jam – and this is Western! He constantly cuts away from the shooting to the shot flailing about in death agonies. Hossein cares about emotion, grief and rage, foremost, and love fueled by grief and rage.

Long dead sections in which nothing happens, as in all Spaghetti Westerns, and one long gag sequence that seems a parody of Leone and a damn good one.

Gorgeous shots of Hossein riding a gorgeous horse – or maybe it's a stunt guy; the camera's never near enough for certainty – and more dead bodies than Act 3 of Hamlet.

In other words, it's pretty great.

PS: It starts in B/W. I feared the usual Amazon fuckup of less-seen films, but it goes to color, as it should, after the opening credits.