(That is me with Oscar winning Director Claude Lelouch) I am a journalist on Long Island and have written for Films In Reivew (www.filmsinreview.com) and Film Score Monthly (www.filmscoremonthly.com)
I have also been part of the Jury for the Stony Brook Film Festival at SUNY Stony Brook
Criterion has just released a mesmerizing collection of films by the French filmmaker Jean Painleve called Science is Fiction: 23 Films by Jean Painleve. The films, extremely idiosyncratic are almost completely beyond description except to say that they mostly concern nature, in particular marine life. Filmmaker Painleve’s surrealist influence is here, but so is Painleve’s discipline and scientific intent. Painleve’s poetic soul manages to bring a degree of horror, eroticism and comedy to the lives and behaviors of his subjects whether they are vampire bats, seahorse, skeleton shrimps, etc.
Criterion has just released The Last Metro from 1980, a production of Les Films du Carrosse and written and directed by maestro Francois Truffaut. The film stars Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu. The plot involves the German occupation of Paris during the Second World War and specifically revolves around Lucas Steiner (Heinz Bennet), a Jewish theatre Director and his gentile wife, Marion Steiner (Deneuve) who hides him from the Nazis in the theatre while she goes about carrying out the responsibilities of acting and running a theatre company. The title refers to the fact that during the winters while Paris was occupied one of the only ways to keep warm was to attend the theatre (which usually ended just as the last train left). As with many of Truffaut’s work, there is a love triangle dynamic her with Deneuve at the center, her husband on one side and an actor in the company on the other (Depardieu).
Deneuve is at the peak of her early middle aged glory and Depardieu is shockingly young and oddly touching.
Criterion’s release is of the two disc variety and includes some interesting archival stuff such as television interviews with Truffaut, Deneuve and Depardieu. There are two separate audio commentaries, one of which Depardieu participates in…
Act quick-The film will be shown until Sunday. April 20th. Great early morning stuff (screenings are at 11 am) with this Max Ophuls tale of the role a pair of earrings play in an adulterous affair...
It’s a neat bit of black humor to see Jean-Paul Belmondo dressed in priest’s attire. Belmondo’s sex appeal is apparent no matter how debilitating this might be to other performers. Belmondo’s magnatism is the secret weapon in yet another Jean-Pierre Melville unearthed masterpiece. Despite Belmondo’s considerable star quality, he is equalled by Emmanuelle Riva as Barny, a widow living in the French countryside during WWII, who goes head-to-head with M. Morin on issues religious and earthly issues first as a lark and then as something more serious. What develops is a kind of chamber piece with the debate’s between the cleric and the widow acting as a kind of bloodless combat.
