Wings of desire, Das boot and lives of others are 3 very good movies.
I’d also throw counterfeiters into this mix of very good German movies, probably also run Lola run?
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The Silence (2010) is one of the better German films of recent times.
From the same director of the excellent hacker film Who am I and the Netflix series Dark.
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The Counterfeiters is one of the 5 movies this week.
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Yeah…that’s a difficult one. I often change the wording around to say
Wings of Desire, directed by Wim Wenders and starring Bruno Ganz and Peter Falk.
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The Lives of Others was, as expected, excellent viewing again, chilling. I will be watching The Counterfieters again as well. What a feast of movies!
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I was in Melbourne for 3 days so got to the Nova for La Belle Époque, with old-timers Daniel Auteuil (Jean de Florette duo, Caché) and ■■■■■ Ardant. They’re a long-term married couple but she’s taken a lover and is getting sick of him and boots him out.
Their son works for a production company that produces bespoke nostalgia scenes (people will pay to be in wishful thinking scenes), and DA wants to replay the time when he met his true love in Lyon in 1974. Naturally complications occur.
Similar in basic theme to the recent Ricardo Darín/Mercedes Moran film Un Amor Menos Pensado, with the same beginning and end but totally different in the middle.
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I saw that earlier this year, just before everything got shut down. It was the opening night film at the French Film Festival. I liked it. It’s very easy for that sort of film to degenerate into the sickliest kind of schmaltz, but this one didn’t. It made me smile.
A couple of films from the 80’s I recall being “offbeat” in various ways:
- Repo Man
- Surf Nazis must Die
- Bagdad Cafe
- The American way, ( with Dennis Hopper)
And for the black skivvy set
- The Kiss of the Spider Women
- Naked Lunch
I was hoping to catch a few days at the Festival in Sydney…but it got cancelled before i got home.
Yes, it was sad. It was cancelled after one week. I saw the opening feature and one other (at which there were three attendees, including me), and then cinemas were shut.
So one more than the attendance at La Belle Époque.
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Have managed to source most of these with ‘Another Round’ being the most easily accessible.
Will try and get through them before Oscar time.
"Fifteen films will advance to the next round of voting in the International Feature Film category for the 93rd Academy Awards. Films from 93 countries were eligible in the category.
Bosnia and Herzegovina, “Quo Vadis, Aida?”
Chile, “The Mole Agent”
Czech Republic, “Charlatan”
Denmark, “Another Round”
France, “Two of Us”
Guatemala, “La Llorona”
Hong Kong, “Better Days”
Iran, “Sun Children”
Ivory Coast, “Night of the Kings”
Mexico, “I’m No Longer Here”
Norway, “Hope”
Romania, “Collective”
Russia, “Dear Comrades!”
Taiwan, “A Sun”
Tunisia, “The Man Who Sold His Skin”
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I went to a preview screening of a film that will be in the French Film Festival, which starts on Wednesday and will run to the end of March. The film was Perfumes, made by Grégory Magne, who’s made a few films I’ve never heard of, and it stars Emmanuelle Devos as a “nose”, i.e., a parfumier with the ability to separate the different components of a fragrance simply by smelling, and trained to know how to combine separate essences to creat a perfume. The male lead is Grégory Montel, who plays a chauffeur who’s hired to drive for her; and the other main character is the chauffeur’s young daughter. It’s a gentle little comedy, no slapstick, no sidesplitting jokes, but a very nice watch nonetheless. Emmanuelle Devos is one of my favourite actresses; I first saw her in a great little crime movie called Read My Lips, in which she played an ugly, deaf girl, and she’s been in a lot of films, some good, some bad; she’s a very powerful actress who dominates the screen when she’s on it.
There’s not a lot in the movie, but what there is is pretty well done. 7.5
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Very timely with Covid destroying people’s sense of smell.
I’m sure I’ve seen something with Emmanuelle Devos. Need to check what.
You might have seen The Beat my Heart Skipped, a truly stupid film about a gangster (Romain Duris) who also happens to be a concert-standard pianist (despite apparently never practising and not having a piano). Emmanuelle Devos had only a small part but she was far and away the best thing in the film.
She was fantastic in In the Beginning, which was a film about a conman who convinces everyone in a provincial town that he’s there to construct a section of autoroute. She plays the mayor of the town.
l have seen her in
A Christmas Tale. 8.5/10 2008 149 min.
French production. Genre: family drama.
Directed by Arnaud Desplechin with Catherine Deneuve (Junon), Jean – Paul Roussillon (Abel), Anne Cosigny (Elizabeth), Mathieu Amalric (Henri), Chiara Mastroianni, Melvil Poupard, Emmanuelle Devos, Hippolyte Girardot, Laurent Capelluto, Emile Berling, Laurent Capelluto, Emile Berling, Francoise Bertin, Samir Guesmi (Simon) & Thomas & Clement Obled (Basille and Baptiste).
Superior family drama. Deneuve plays Junon the matriarch of a family that is in disarray over a dispute between two of the children, the wild and exploitive Henri and the cold and calculating Elizabeth. She has shunned him and had him banished from the family for five years, for almost ruining the family in scandal. To complicate matters Junon has liver cancer. The only thing that will save her is a bone marrow transplant. Henri is compatible as a donor but so is Elizabeth’s son, who is unstable and alienated. Tensions rise and flaws are revealed in all. Not a sunny Christmas tale by any means but enthralling nonetheless. Amalric is superb throughout in a dynamic performance, but the rest of the cast gives fine support.
It’s also an amazing novel by Patrick Suskind.
Completely different story. They have similar titles but no relation at all.
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Today I went to one of the French Film Festival films. Its English title is Love Affair(s), although the French title translates as Things One Says; Things One Does, which is much better. For the first 10 minutes I hated it, to the point where I was considering walking out; but I ended by loving it. It is very like an Eric Rohmer film: lots and lots of talking, very little action, a cast of beautiful people beautifully dressed and living in beautiful apartments and houses in beautiful places, nobody doing any work. The basic story is about a young man who goes to stay with his cousin and his wife, but arrives to find that the cousin is away so that he’s left with the wife (who’s 3 months pregnant) as his hostess until the cousin returns. They start to tell each other about their love lives, and their stories are told in flashbacks. It develops into a series of interlocking stories and becomes more and more complicated until it finally resolves in a very touching way.
The director is Emmanuel Mouret, whom I’d never heard of but who turns out to have made 11 feature films since the late 90s, the titles of a few of which are vaguely familiar. The two major actors are Camélia Jordana and Niels Schneider, both completely unknown to me.
Very definitely not for everyone, but it gets 7.2 on imdb, so a few must like it as much as I did.
A special shout-out to the cinematographer, Laurent Desmet. I don’t think there was a single use of a hand-held camera, and what a delight it was not to have my attention continually distracted by the shakes.
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