Foreign Film February: Pierrot le Fou (1962)

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I am an emotional cinephile, not an intellectual one. What I mean by that is that when I watch a film, I respond to it with my gut, with my heart, not my mind. My favorite films are ones that move me in some way. As is probably painfully obvious from my reviews, I don’t spend a lot of time analyzing a film for its deeper meanings or its themes. I don’t necessarily spend hours digging into the filmmaker’s personal beliefs, what they’ve said in interviews, or the political climate the film was made in.

Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t use my intellect when watching a film. I am often stimulated by the filmmaking techniques, the director’s sense of style, and how they tell their story. I love reading intellectual critiques of films; I’m just not all that capable of writing one. I’ll let you decide if that is a good or a bad thing.

What this means is that sometimes I come across a film and have no idea how to talk about it. Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou is a meta-movie, a crime thriller, a relationship drama, and so much more.

The plot is fairly simple. Ferdinand Griffon (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is sick of his average, boring life. His wife drags him to a party where the men talk like commercials selling cars and the women sound like an ad for skin cream. He leaves early and discovers the babysitter, Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), sound asleep. He agrees to take her home, and they reminisce about how they used to be lovers.

Those reminisces turn into something more, and they run away, turn to crime, and have a bit of a Bonnie and Clyde situation. It turns out she’s got a history; her brother has been a criminal for quite some time, and…well, now that I think about it, that simple plot gets a little complicated.

The thing is, Godard is taking a fairly standard crime plot, and he’s having all kinds of fun with it. The title of the film literally translates to “Pierrot, the Fool.” Marianne constantly calls Ferdinand “Pierrot,” to which he always replies, “My name is Ferdinand.” The name Pierrot refers to the sad clown of Commedia dell’arte.

The film makes various references to French literature (most of which went over my head, but my wife filled me in), and movies. At that party early in the film, the great American director Samuel Fuller shows up and discusses film by saying “Film is like a battleground. There’s love, hate, action, violence, death… in one word: emotion.” Well known French actor Jean-Pierre Leaud shows up as an extra at one point. You can barely see him at the bottom of the frame while our heroes are at a movie.

The score often cuts out for a second only to come back as if Godard is trying to remind us we are watching a film and that real life doesn’t come with a soundtrack. At least a couple of times, characters look straight at the camera and speak to the audience. Marianne catches Ferdinand doing it and asks, “Who are you talking to?” To which he replies, “The audience.”

This is where I come back to the part where I’m not intellectual enough to talk about this film. There is so much going on in every second of this film that I’ve barely covered it. I can’t cover it, because I know I missed most of it. I’m just not qualified to give this a true review.

That isn’t to say I didn’t like the film. On the contrary, I loved it. I’ve seen enough films to understand that Godard is being playful, that he’s calling attention to the fact he’s making a film while also making a thoroughly enjoyable story.

I don’t think you have to be a total film nerd or an intellectual to enjoy this film. I think it can be enjoyed at face value while providing many layers for smart people to sift through. Highly recommended.

Foreign Film February: Elevator to the Gallows (1958)

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A woman whispers “I love you, I love you” over and over on the phone.

In an office, a businessman, Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet), talks mindlessly to a telephone operator. They talk about the long upcoming weekend. Then he goes into his office and closes the door. In a desk drawer he takes out a grappling hook, a pair of gloves, and a gun. He puts on the gloves and takes the rest with him.

He climbs out a window onto a long balcony. He uses the grappling hook to climb up to the floor above. He enters through a window and then walks to his boss’s office. They discuss an upcoming deal, and then Julien shoots his boss in the head.

The boss was a war profiteer, and Julien is an ex soldier so it is possible that that the killing is political. Later we’ll learn that the voice on the telephone belonged to Florence (Jeanne Moreau), the boss’ wife and Julien’s lover. So, probably they cooked up a scheme to kill him and run away together.

He puts the gun into the boss’s hand, making it look like a suicide. Then he locks the doors, cleverly using a knife to block the lock until he closes the door from the outside, making it appear it was locked from the inside.

As he is climbing back down to his floor, his office phone rings. The operator is with the security guard, who is ready for them to leave so he can lock up. In a rush to answer, Julien forgets about the grappling hook. He tells them he’ll be ready in a minute, then walks out with them.

He walks across the street and starts his car only to look up and see the rope flapping in the wind. He rushes back to the building and takes the elevator up. Before he can get there, the security guard turns off all the power, trapping Julian inside the elevator.

Outside, a young flower girl, Veronique (Yori Bertin) and her boyfriend, Louis (Georges Poujouly), stare at Julien’s car. It is fancy and fast and too much for Louis to resist. He jumps in and starts to drive away. Veronique protests, saying that Julien will kill him for the deed, as his body is full of medals and scars.

They’ll spend the evening driving aimlessly around Paris. Eventually they will cross paths with an older German couple in a sports car. They’ll race each other and then find themselves at a motel. Veronique is excited to register as man and wife, but afraid to use their real names. So she chooses Mr. and Mrs. Julien Tavernier. The two couples will drink and tell stories. Louis pretends to have lived Julien’s life. But the old man calls him out.

An act of violence will send Veronique and Louis on the run.

Meanwhile, Florence will wander the streets of Paris looking for Julien, while Miles Davis plays on the soundtrack.

Julien tears the elevator apart trying to find a way to escape. He manages to open the door, but it is between floors, and there isn’t enough room to escape.

These three stories will come together in wonderful ways.

Elevator to the Gallows was the first film directed by Louis Malle. It is a fascinating take on the film noir. Most noirs would begin much earlier in the story. We’d see Julian and Florence first meet – perhaps at a party or while she was visiting her husband at the office. They’d have a torrid affair and fall in love. She’d talk about how horrible her husband was, how he made money from those terrible wars. And they’d hatch a plan to kill him. The murder would come much later in the movie.

But here it is at the beginning. We see none of the love love or lust these two have for each other. Other than that telephone call at the very beginning, they do not talk to each other on screen, and they spend the entire film apart.

You can see the beginning of the French New Wave in that. Malle is taking an American film genre, and he’s playing with it a little bit. This isn’t quite the full deconstruction folks like Goddard would be doing within a few years, but he’s clearly putting his own spin on things.The plot comes together perfectly. I’d seen the film before, but the details had been lost. My memory said it came out one way, but in reality it came out another, and that way was even better. This is a near-perfect film, and it comes highly recommended.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Vengeance of the Zombies (1973)

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As it is Foreign Film February, I wanted to do a non-English language film for my Friday Night Horror flick. It has also been a long day, so I grabbed the thing closest to me, which was my Paul Naschy boxed set. There are five films in that set, and I hope to watch and review them all over the next couple of months. I love the idea of reviewing all the DVDs I own, but that is a monumental task.

Vengeance of the Zombies is an absolutely bonkers film. In the booklet that came with this set, Naschy (who wrote the film) is quoted as having probably been on hashish when he sat down at his typewriter. That definitely checks out.

It also checks out that this was a chepie exploitation flick. Technically there is a plot, but it is so haphazardly put together it is impossible to make sense of.

Someone is killing a bunch of women in London. Then someone else, a voodoo priest named Kantanka (Paul Naschy), is bringing them back to life as part of his zombie horde. Naschy also plays Krisna an East Indian mystic.

Elvire Irving (Romy) thinks Krisna is one cool cat and follows him to his big mansion out in the country. The big mansion was once the home of an evil family who were eventually murdered and hung upon the trees in the yard.

There are a lot of dream sequences where Kantanka and some other foul faced fiends attack Elvire. In one particularly groovy dream sequence, Paul Naschy plays Satan, to whom various others make sacrifices. Another sequence (which may or may not be a dream; it is difficult to tell), a lady wearing a big box painted like a man’s face dances around while Kantanka pours blood onto corpses to turn them alive. Or something.

Scotland Yard gets involved but is mostly useless.

Seriously, I just watched this film, and I’m having a hard time remembering anything about the actual plot.

There is lots of murdering. Plenty of ladies wearing sheer nightgowns. And loads of gratuitous sex.

I do love the sex scenes in these types of films. During one scene, the housekeeper is upset over something. Krisna tells her everything is going to be ok. Then he looks at her, the music starts up, and he then pulls down the covers, pulls down her top, and gropes her breasts three times. She then sits up and passionately kisses him.

In another scene, Elvire goes into a barn only to find a woman with her head nearly chopped off. Then she is attacked by a dude with a scythe. Krisna jumps in and saves the day. They then go to the house, where she tells him that he should call the cops. He brusquely says “no” to which she responds by making out with him.

I’ve been doing my seduction techniques all wrong, I guess.

The music is a wild mix of popular rock and funk. It is so crazily inappropriate for most of what’s happening on screen.

This is a ridiculously bad film in every imaginable way. But it’s also a lot of fun to watch. It is the kind of film you want to watch late at night with a group of friends while getting loaded. Check your brain at the door and get ready for ridiculousness.

Foreign Film February: Five Deadly Venoms (1978)

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Welcome back to Foreign Film February. This is one of my longest-running movie themes. I think it is second only to 31 Days of Horror,in terms of longevity. I’ve been doing it since February 2022.

It is the 6th of February, and this is my first post to Foreign Film February, which feels a little late, but also reminds me of how much I’ve been stepping back from my movie themes. My original theme month was 31 Days of Horror, and I initially tried to write about one movie per day. But that is difficult, and all my other themes quickly became less than that.

Still, I always tried to write as many posts as I could with each theme. Some did better than others. But now I write a Friday Night Horror column, and a Pick of the Week, plus I do Five Cool Things every other week, and I’ve been writing a lot of reviews for Cinema Sentries. None of that is going to stop, and so there is a realization that I won’t be writing as many posts about each month’s theme. I’ll still try to do a theme each month; just don’t expect so many posts.

I thought I’d start this month’s FFF with something fun. I’ve written about the Shaw Brothers films numerous times, and I am a big fan of the studio’s kung fu output. This film comes from Arrow Video’s first big boxed set of Shaw Brothers films and is one of their most popular films.

Five Deadly Venoms is a clear favorite of Quentin Tarantino’s. It likely influenced the fictional TV show that Mia Wallace from Pulp Fiction starred in, The Deadly Viper Squad, and certainly influenced the Kill Bill films (there is a fan theory that the events of Kill Bill are actually part of that series, which makes it all a fictional TV series within the real Pulp Fiction universe, but I digress.)

It is a strange film within the Shaw Brothers filmography, as it relies more on story than most, with the action sequences taking a bit of a back seat. At the heart of the film is a mystery, or rather multiple mysteries, as we’ll see.

It begins with the dying master of the Five Deadly Vipers clan sending his last pupil, Yang Tieh (Chiang Sheng), on a mission to stop the other clan members dead in their tracks. The Vipers, it seems, have been up to no good; they have become an evil clan. It is unclear whether the master set them up this way (probably) and now that he’s dying he wants to set things right, or if they went wrong somewhere along the way.

Either way, Yang Tieg is now charged with finding them and stopping them from getting some mysterious treasure. Finding that treasure and giving it to charity will put karma on his side.

The trouble is each of the five clan members (and the dude who has the treasure) is a mystery. When they left the master’s teachings, they took on new identities.

They are all likely in one village where the treasure should also be. When Yang Tieg arrives in that village, he finds a family has been brutally murdered. The treasure may have been stolen from them.

So, Yang Tieg must find the treasure and figure out who each of the five clan members are. The five clan members are all trying to find the treasure. And now the police have a murder to solve.

I’m not against convoluted mysteries, but this one stays confusing and not all that interesting. The script never leans into one of them. Instead we wander from one clan member to the next, and then hang out with the governor and the police trying to solve the murder.

What is cool about this movie is those five clan members – the Five Deadly Venoms—follow a specific style of fighting: Centipede, Snake, Scorpion, Lizard, and Toad. The clan master introduces them early in the film. Each of them wears totally rad masks and demonstrates their fighting style (Centipede is so fast with his arms it looks like 1,000 punches come at you at once – Snake crawls on the ground, etc.). Each fighter fights like his namesake.

That stuff is so much fun. Unfortunately, because each clan member is hiding from the other, they hardly wear their masks, and they rarely use their special techniques. This film would be 1,000 times cooler if it was just Yang Tieh discovering each of the Vipers one by one and fighting them in their full regalia.

There are moments of interest throughout. At one point the evil governor puts one of the Vipers into an Iron Maiden like device with a thousand nails that is suppossed to find his one weak spot. Another guy gets a thin knife stuck into his brain through his nose.

But mostly we get a convoluted mystery. The finale does give us some cool fighting, and that is worth the price of admission. But it sure is a slog getting there.

Foreign Film February: Le Corbeau (1943)

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In a small French town, someone calling themselves The Raven (or Le Corbeau in French) is sending out poison pen letters – gossipy missives accusing various townsfolk of scandalous goings-on. Though letters are sent to nearly everyone in town, accusing loads of people of all sorts of terrible things, they concentrate on Dr. Rémy Germain (Pierre Fresnay) accusing him of having an illicit affair and of performing illegal abortions.

At first, the letters are kind of funny, at least to those who are not being accused, but as more and more of the townsfolk are being accused things become serious quickly. One man commits suicide after being told something in a letter. Fingers get pointed. Demands are made to those in power. The letters must be stopped.

Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot who also helmed the masterful Diabolique (1955) and The Wages of Fear (1953) Le Corbeau is a terrific little mystery in which the answer to who The Raven really is doesn’t matter nearly as much as what those letters do to the townspeople.

Made in the middle of the Nazi occupation of France the film can be seen as a commentary of the paranoia many French people felt during this period. Never knowing who to trust or what to believe. Interestingly, it also caused problems for its directors since it was produced by a German company, and the French were none too accepting of Germany-made things after the war. They eventually got over it.

It is sometimes called the first French film noir and I can totally see that with the moody black-and-white photography and Dutch angles. It falls just short of being the masterpiece that the two other films of his I mentioned earlier in this review, but Le Corbeau is still a wonderful film deserving your attention.

Foreign Film February – Mothra Vs Godzilla (1964)

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When I was a kid, all those old Godzilla movies were on television regularly. I’m guessing they were Saturday night movies on one of the local UHF stations, but I don’t really remember. What I do remember is how much I loved them. My favorite was Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla. Not because I thought the film was superior to the others but because in that boyhood way of arguing who could beat who in a fight, I thought Mechagodzilla was best equipped to defeat regular Godzilla. T my young mind a robot Godzilla was the coolest. My friends would choose King Ghidorah, or Rodan, or one of the other monsters and we’d endlessly argue over who would win in a fight.

I more or less forgot about Godzilla once I became a teenager. I had no interest in the 1998 film starring Matthew Broderick or the 2014 film with Aaron Taylor Johnson. And then the Criterion Collection released the original Godzilla.

The original Godzilla was released in 1954. It was a huge success in Japan and in 1956 the rights were sold for an American release. The Americans dubbed it into English, cut most of the political allegory out of it, and did a bunch of inserts starring Raymond Burr. I’m sure it was that version I watched growing up. The Criterion release included the Japanese version of the film and that got a lot of press. I bought that disc and loved the film.

Later Criterion released an incredible boxed set featuring all of the so-called Showa Films. I bought that set (it sits proudly next to my Ingmar Bergman boxed set from Criterion making it look like Godzilla is touching Liv Ullmann’s face.)

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I’m slowly working my way through all the Godzilla films and I recently sat down with Mothra vs Godzilla. Like a lot of Godzilla films from this era, there is a lot of buildup before we even get to Godzilla much less his battle with another monster.

A beach is wrecked by a typhoon. Afterward, a giant blueish egg washes ashore. Some greedy businessmen purchase the egg from the fishermen who have rights to everything inside the cove. They immediately start building a theme park around the egg dreaming of the millions they will make off of it.

They are visited by a couple of twin fairies who say the egg was laid by Mothra a giant moth-shaped god that protects their island. They beg the businessmen to return the egg to Mothra, but instead, the men try to capture the fairies.

After I watched the film I learned there was a previous film entitled Mothra that deepens the legend behind the moth-god. The fairies befriend some kindly reporters before returning home.

Enter Godzilla. Once again he wreaks havoc upon the Japanese island. The reporters beg the fairies to help them destroy Godzilla. Mothra agrees only when Godzilla makes eyes for the giant egg.

Before you think that a moth, no matter how giant, could do anything against an enormous radioactive dinosaur, let me just tell you that Mothra’s wings are so powerful they essentially cause a hurricane whenever she flies. She’s also got some badass powder that hurts Godzilla in some way.

Godzilla ultimately defeats Mothra with his radioactive breath. But it is the egg that saves the day. When it hatches it releases some killer caterpillars with monster choppers and an ability to spray weblike stuff from their hind quarters.

Godzilla movies are inherently silly. And awesome. You can spend all sorts of time trying to point out their various themes and trying to suss out some deeper meaning. Or you can just enjoy a giant lizard fighting an enormous moth.

Foreign Film February: The Magician (1958)

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The Magician often gets overlooked when it comes to discussing the films of Ingmar Bergman. Part of this is due to timing. Made just a year after the duo masterpieces The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries it feels small and lesser in comparison. He followed it with The Virgin Spring, Through a Glass Darkly, and Winter Light, three deeply felt films that wrestle with the existence of God and human suffering.

But while The Magician certainly is a lesser film when compared with those movies, I wouldn’t skip it when taking in Bergman’s filmography. Were it made by a lesser director, or perhaps if it had even fallen somewhere else in his oeuvre I suspect The Magician would be talked about much more.

A traveling troupe of performers who sometimes sell themselves as magicians or spiritualists, and sometimes work as healers selling various medicinal concoctions are on the run from the law.

When they arrive in a small village in Sweden they are immediately stopped by the police and taken to a large house where they are questioned by the Police Superintendent (Toivo Pawlo), Dr. Vergerus, the Minister of Health (Gunnar Björnstrand), and Consul Egerman (Erland Josephson). Egerman, who is fascinated by the occult makes a wager with Vergerus, a skeptic, about the veracity of the troupe’s supernatural abilities.

After answering some questions the troupe agrees to perform their act the next morning. The troupe is ostensibly led by Tubal (Åke Fridell) who is the talker, the showman of the bunch, but the Magician is Vogler (Max Von Sydow) who pretends to be mute for much of the film. He is assisted by his wife Manda (Ingrid Thulin) who dresses as and pretends to be a man. There is also an old lady, simply called Granny (Naima Wifstrand), and their driver Simson (Lars Ekborg).

Because this is a Bergman film he is interested in the tension between the supernatural and science, faith and unbelief. It plays a little with whether or not the troupe has real powers before they admit they are frauds.

At the evening meal, Tubal tries to sell some of Granny’s potions. One of the maids is very interested in a love potion. She happily buys it from him then sly admits she doesn’t want it, but rather she wants him. Another maid (Bibi Andersson) drinks the potion and uses it as an excuse to seduce Simson. Everyone uses superstition to get what they want.

One of the other reasons I suspect this film doesn’t get its due is that tonally it is working in a few different playgrounds. It is sometimes a farce, playing the situation for laughs, and then it will switch into something more dramatic, towards the end it gives us a ten-minute scene that is pure horror. Those things don’t always gel well, but it mostly worked for me. The horror segment especially. It isn’t particularly scary, but Bergman, working with cinematographer Gunnar Fischer are such great technicians the scene works perfectly on a technical level.

The cast is as good as you would expect. I love when Von Sydow works with Bergman and he’s as wonderful as ever. It is a beautifully shot and constructed film. I’m always in awe of how gorgeous Bergman’s films look and this is especially beautiful, even though most of it takes place indoors.

It isn’t Bergman’s best film by far, but it proves that even when his films aren’t masterpieces, there is still plenty to enjoy and ponder.

Foreign Film February: Certified Copy (2010)

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Certified Copy, Abbas Kiarostami’s 2010 drama is a strange, beautiful, perplexing film that puts a giant question mark up in the middle of its story and then never bothers to give the audience an answer.

It begins with a lecture. James Miller (William Shimell), a British writer is giving a talk about his new book, Certified Copy, which argues that copies of art – reproductions of paintings, sculptures, etc. – are themselves unique and therefore authentic art.

The film gives him space for the argument. In most films, whenever a lecturer stands before a class, we only hear a few moments of what they are saying before the bell rings, they are interrupted, or the film moves on. We only need to know they are a person with knowledge who is capable of passing that knowledge on to others. What they’re actually saying isn’t important. But here we spend quite a long time with the focus on Miller and what he is saying.

I got so caught up in his lecture that when a woman (Juliette Binoche, whose character name is never given) came in late and then fussed with her belongings, and quietly mimed to her young son I was annoyed at her interruption. How rude, I thought, can’t this woman sit quietly and let me hear what this man is saying? I had to remind myself I was watching a film and that this woman’s actions were what the movie was focussing on and thus I should pay attention to her, not the lecture.

Later he’ll find himself inside her antiques shop. It is filled with originals and copies. He’s delighted seeing that this will give them plenty to talk about. She’s irritated and notes that she only owns the shop by accident and that she doesn’t care for any of it.

They go for a ride. They talk about his book. They argue over art. She hated his book, yet asked him to sign multiple copies of it for her. She takes him to a museum and shows him a piece that was, for hundreds of years, thought to be an authentic bit of ancient Roman art. When they discovered it was a forgery, they kept it on display and added the story. Even the fake has meaning.

In a coffee shop, the proprietor will mistake them for an old married couple. She’ll run with the idea, creating an entire back story for them. I don’t want to spoil where the film goes from there, but it continues to toy with the idea of identity. Of what is real and what is fake, and whether or not the distinction really matters.

I suspect it is the type of film that critics love and the average moviegoer is either perplexed by or outright hates. I landed somewhere in the middle. I appreciated the discussions on art and that the film was taking some big swings toward something original and meaningful. My wife and I had a lovely little chat about the film after the credits rolled.

But I found it more of an intellectual exercise than an entertaining one. I tend to fall on the side of movies should be an enjoyable viewing experience over wanting movies to challenge me or stimulate my mind. They can do both, of course, and I’m not against challenging films, but these days I mostly want something I find enjoyable to watch.

I will say this is a film I’d like to see again. Knowing where it goes plotwise would help me concentrate on the other things it’s doing and I suspect I’d like it a lot more on a second viewing.

Foreign Film February: Hokuriku Proxy War (1977)

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I continue to sing Radiance Films praises. They are carving out a nice little niche market in the larger Boutique Blu-ray landscape. Their focus seems to be on foreign language arthouse films that are lesser known. The type of film that would be skipped by Criterion but are generally still quite good.

Hokuriku Proxy War is a fun little Japanese Crime Drama that is a bit confusing in the story department but more than makes up for it in its action. You can read my full review here.

Foreign Film February: Keep An Eye Out (2018)

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Louis Fugain (Grégoire Ludig) discovers a bloody corpse outside his apartment complex and calls the police. At the police station, he is questioned by Commissaire Buron (Benoît Poelvoorde). Quickly we realize two things 1. Fugain is the main suspect. 2. Buron is an idiot of the Inspector Clouseau variety.

We first see them together at the station. Fugain is seated, waiting impatiently for Buron to get off the phone. His conversation is mundane, trying to set a date with someone for dinner. It lasts a long time. It seems a strange thing for a Commissiare to be doing in front of a man he thinks may have just committed murder. It is a strange movie.

After a few questions, Buron leaves to go speak to his son and eat a hotdog. He leaves Fugain with Phillippe (Marc Fraize) a one-eyed rookie who regularly ends his sentences with “Actually.”

A terrible accident occurs which Buron tries to cover up.

While Buron questions Fugain the film flashbacks to the scene. Sometimes Phillippe, or his wife, or Buron appear in those flashbacks and interact with Fugain even though they were not there in those scenes in the past.

The film plays it half-serious while regularly winking at the audience in its absurdities. It is difficult to explain just how ridiculous, how absurd, how French this film is. I won’t spoil how it ends, but to say it is utterly surprising and yet somehow fitting.