Tag: french cinema

Foreign Film February: Elevator to the Gallows (1958)

elevator to the gallows

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. 

Last Known Address (1970) Blu-ray Review

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I love a good shoe leather movie. That’s a film that gets into the nuts and bolts of a job. Whether it is police work, newspaper reporting or any other thing, it is fascinating to watch people really do their jobs. Last Known Address has a lot of shoe leather. We watch our two cops knock on doors, meticulously dig through paperwork and do the type of policing most movies skip over.

There is a balance to that, you have to make the shoe leather interesting or audience will get bored and skip to something else. This movie keeps it interesting. I loved it.

You can read my full review here.

What Is It Good For? War Movies In June: Army of Shadows (1969)

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I did an absolutely terrible job of watching and reviewing war movies for this theme. I rewatched the great Army of Shadows this past month, and while I didn’t get around to writing anything about it this time, I did jot down some thoughts on my Letterboxd the first time I watched it a few years ago. So, I thought I’d reproduce those here:

There is a scene early in Army of Shadows in which three French Resistance fighters capture a traitor. They take him to an abandoned house to execute him. When they arrive, they find a family has moved in next door. The gun they hoped to use is of no use. It is too loud. The family would hear. 

They search the house for a knife. No luck. The basement connects to the neighbors’. No good. They stand together, these three men, alongside the man they plan to kill, discussing what to do. 

They could take him somewhere else. No time. They could call a friend and have him do it. No, it is their job. They could strangle him with a towel tied around a stick that would slowly tighten around his neck. Yes, that would work.

The trouble is, none of these men are trained killers or soldiers. They were regular people before the war, but now they’ve joined a make-shift army. They’ve found a cause. They cannot let this man live, or they jeopardize everything. 

They were prepared to shoot the traitor, which is impersonal and quick. They are not trained to watch the life drain out of him as they slowly tighten the towel. They do the deed and leave not as great heroes, but men who’ve lost some part of themselves, deflated, almost defeated.

Jean-Pierre Melville was a member of the French Resistance, and Army of Shadows is his film about the deep wounds, physical, psychological, and spiritual such a thing leaves inside a person. It isn’t a film with a lot of thrilling action sequences or where great heroes emerge. Like the scene I’ve just described, it is a movie about men and women who fight for a cause they believe in, who are willing to do things that destroy them inside for the greater good. 

This was my sixth Melville film in the last couple of weeks. I’ve loved nearly all of them, but this is his masterpiece.

He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not (2002)

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I’m back on my bullshit again – pondering why I write anything at all. While I do that, I figure I’ll keep posting old reviews from Cinema Sentries. Even if I never write a new thing specifically for this blog, I’d still like to make this a full depository of everything I’ve ever written.

This French film cuts itself in half, showing the same scenes from two wildly different perspectives. It stars the always wonderful Audrey Tautou, and according to my review, I mostly liked it.

Delicatessen (1991) 4K UHD Review

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My wife speaks French. She has a Masters Degree in French Linguistics. She taught French at university for a time. She loves all things French. Especially movies. Obviously, I love movies and I dig foreign language films. I’ve seen a lot more movies than here, but she is the expert in French cinema in our house. She turned me on to director Jean-Pierre Jeunet with his absolutely delightful film Amelie. Then she hit me with his stranger, darker films Delicatessen and City of Lost Children.

Delicatessen is a visually stunning tale set in a post-apocalyptic world in which a butcher puts a help-wanted ad in the paper then murders those who answer and sells their meat to the rest of the apartment. It is romantic, funny, and a delight. You can read my full review here.

Weak Spot (1975) Blu-ray Review

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Weak Spot is a film that is difficult to explain or sum up. I reviewed it for Cinema Sentries a little over a month ago. I’ve been meaning to link to that review in these pages. I’ve literally queued it up at least four different times. But each time I’ve stared at this blank page not knowing how to write this little summary to get you interested enough to click over and read my review.

It is a French-Italian-German coproduction based on a Greek novel. It takes place in an unnamed location that is under totalitarian rule. It follows a man who may or may not be a subversive who is caught possibly passing a secret message onto another subversive. He is very casually taken to the capital city for questions by police who don’t seem all that interested in their jobs.

It is full of ridiculous situations played totally straight. It is confusing and weird and rather delightful.

I recommend watching it. I hope this intrigues you enough to click on this link and read my full review.

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: 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.

The Prince’s Voyage (2019) Blu-ray Review

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I’m an amateur film reviewer. I don’t do this for money. The closest I get is landing some free Blu-rays from Cinema Sentries. I do this for fun. I like movies. I like talking about movies. I think I’m pretty good at it, but I’m not professional. I didn’t go to film school.

I follow a lot of professional film writers on social media. Sometimes they complain about amateur film writers like me. Sometimes they complain that bad reviews just talk about the plot of a movie. Good reviews should talk about a film’s themes, about the filmmaking, and style. Plot synopsis can be found on Wikipedia.

I get that to a degree. But I’d also argue that it depends on what type of review you are doing. Often a review exists simply to give an opinion on whether or not the film is worth watching. To do that you are going to need to talk about plot. At least a little bit. People want to know what a movie is about before they decide whether or not they want to watch it.

I think about these things when I’m writing a review. I think about them when I read old reviews. Because I’m an amateur, because I’ve never studied film in a formal way I don’t always have something meaningful to say about a film. When I don’t have much to say I revert to talking about the plot. I hope I do it in an entertaining, or at least interesting way. I try not to give too much away while still letting you know something about the film. I never think those reviews are my best, but sometimes that’s what you get.

That is a lot of words to say that my review of The Prince’s Voyage is mostly about the plot. That’s actually good for me because I remember very little about it. I wrote this review back in May of 2021. Now you can read it too.