NYFF 2014: Chris’ Top 5 – A year dominated by its main slate Not much more can be said about the sheer grandeur and highbrow allure of the New York Film Festival. Gala debuts and celebrity red carpet events have become quite the norm for the festival, making its 52nd installment no exception. No, this …
In Mathieu Amalric’s The Blue Room, love is a corrosive agent, an arsenic-like poison that slowly works its way into your heart. Amalric writes, directs and stars in this contorted but calculated little flick with a dark beating heart, adapted from a slim novel by Georges Simenon. It depicts the prelude to and aftermath of a possible murder (eschewing the actual murder itself, leaving things gleefully ambiguous). Amalric plays Julien Gahyde, who’s suspected of killing his wife (Lea Drucker). Amalric’s real-life partner Stéphanie Cléau plays Julien’s mistress, Esther Despierre, whose sickly husband owns a pharmacy with his mother. Amalric displays admirable trust in his viewers; he doesn’t withhold information as much as he carefully feeds us certain contemplated bits that add up to a beautifully hazy whole.
What is art if not an artist’s fiction translated into reality? A fiction wrought from fear, self-loathing and prejudice that escapes the confines of a sonnet and burrows its way into the collective consciousness. Now it is reality. Now it has power. Now it’s an idea, and ideas are poisonous. Rather than dispelling the poisonous reality, Polanski’s Venus in Fur toys with the delicate fiction lying beneath. It’s a study in role-playing, where the players and creators are equally baffled by the game. More importantly, this is the intensely personal work of an artist who understands that only by blurring the lines between fiction and reality can he approach what Herzog calls, “the ecstatic truth.”
More than perhaps any other director, the work of Ernst Lubitsch has been the most noticeable influence on Wes Anderson’s style. Though the great German-American writer-director, most prolific in the 1930s and 1940s, was never quite so aesthetically bold in the look of his sets, he too was preoccupied with meticulous staging for comedy within his chosen locales, be they the titular Shop Around the Corner or the Parisian hotel of Ninotchka; The Grand Budapest Hotel is set in a fictional European country, the Republic of Zubrowka, another Lubitsch trait from works like The Merry Widow and The Love Parade, though The Shop Around the Corner happens to be set in the city Anderson’s mountaintop lodging house takes its name from. He garnered the descriptor of ‘the Lubitsch touch’ thanks to the moving sincerity that always made itself evident within even his more broad comedic premises, and Anderson’s own best work is that in which a recognisable humanism always makes itself known and potent even within the stylised stiltedness through which most of his characters are written and performed.
Set in the icy backdrop of the Swiss Alps, L’amour est un crime parfait (Love is the Perfect Crime) is a dark thriller that blurs the lines between fantasy and reality. With a rich emphasis on the link between man, literature, and landscape, the film takes its audience for a chilling ride.
Quantum of Solace Written by Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade Directed by Marc Forster UK, 2008 On the Mousterpiece Cinema podcast, Josh and I frequently joke about our “Island Films” by which we don’t mean the films that we would hypothetically take to a desert island, but the films that we are alone on an island in …
Cosmopolis Written for the screen and directed by David Cronenberg Canada/France/Portugal/Italy, 2012 Though dissimilar in regards to thematic or narrative content, Cosmopolis bears a noticeable similarity to David Cronenberg’s last film, A Dangerous Method, in that both are heavily packed with lengthy, slow-moving conversation sequences that are predominantly free of sound outside of the spoken …
“Tournée is quite easily one of the year’s best, and shows a huge amount of potential for Almaric’s directorial career.” Tournée Directed by Mathieu Amalric Written by Mathieu Amalric, Philippe Di Folco, Marcelo Novais Teles & Raphaëlle Valbrune France – 2010 A staple of French Cinema for almost two decades, in recent years Mathieu Amalric …