Classe Tous Risques

Classe Tous Risques (2008 DVD)
Directed by Claude Sautet
France and Italy, 1960
In French and Italian with English subtitles

Yet another lovingly-constructed French gangster film. While the DNA of the plot--a career criminal trying to pull off one last score before settling down for good--will be familiar to anyone who's seen more than one crime movie in the last fifty years, Sautet and co-screenwriters José Giovanni and Pascal Jardin depart from form by cultivating a neorealist/noir hybrid that subverts expectations. An early scene's daytime robbery and escape through the streets of Milan would be a nice way to kickstart the action no matter who was behind the camera, for example, but here it takes on an even grittier tone than the norm since Ghislain Cloquet's documentary approach cloaks the city in a grainy black and white that just feels more real somehow. On the narrative front, the film's genre-friendly dissection of friendship and loyalty among criminals likewise takes an unexpected turn when fugitive Abel Davos (star Lino Ventura), who's been "sentenced to death in absentia," gets stuck dragging his two kids from Milan to Nice and on to Paris in the sort of existential "tourist class" hinted at by the title. Finally, while no cast member is disappointing in the least, Ventura and Jean-Paul Belmondo are particularly winning as the two gangsters thrown into an uneasy but believable friendship when things start to go sour. In other words, another keeper. (http://www.criterion.com/)

"She wanted to warn him to be careful. But what was the point?"

Der Letzte Mann

Der Letzte Mann (2006 DVD)
Dirigida por F.W. Murnau
Alemania, 1924
Silente con un intertítulo en inglés

Dos años después del éxito de Nosferatu en 1922, F.W. Murnau triunfó de nuevo con otra película mucho más introspectiva. El último hombre (o La última risa como se llama en inglés gracias a un traductor poco escrupuloso) tiene que ver con lo que sucede cuando un portero, envejecido y débil, pierde su empleo al hotel de lujo dónde ha trabajado por años. Otros traumas siguen este primer asunto desmoralizador en la vida del anciano (protagonizado por Emil Jannings con convicción), nos proporcionando un retrato sobre la pobreza y la vejez que me parece una especie de antepasado cinemático del gran Umberto D. (1952) de Vittorio de Sica. A diferencia del clásico neorealista all'italiano, el alemán Murnau libremente mezcla toques naturalistas y expresionistas en el momento de enfrentar esta situación. La historia se narra con un único intertítulo, una proeza excepcional que llama la atención a la poesía visual del cineasta y de su cinematógrafo Karl Freund. En una escena, se usa el trucaje para distorsionar las caras de los vecinos cuando se burlan del portero luego de su "caída". En otra, las casas de vecindad del barrio parecen hundirse al frente de la figura solitaria del hombre avergonzado. Aunque el "guión" de Carl Meyer hace hincapié en los vínculos entre el dinero y el prestigio social de manera sorprendente para aquel entonces, irónicamente mi única queja hoy es que el inesperado final felíz parece representar una forma de capitulación artística al nivel argumental. Sea lo que sea, esta obra queda un buenísimo ejemplo del splendor de otrora que se pueden encontrar entre los nitratos de plata. ¡Un filmazo! (http://www.kino.com/)

La cara de desgracia (Herr Emil Jannings)

Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw

Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw (2001 paperback)
by Mark Bowden
USA, 2001
ISBN 978-0-14-200095-3

A riveting account of the sixteen-month manhunt for former Medellín drug cartel leader/one-time Forbes magazine-certified "seventh richest man in the world" Pablo Escobar. Fans of Bowden's earlier Black Hawk Down won't be surprised by the frenetic pace of the narrative or the reporter's agile reconstruction of events based on interviews with many of the key participants involved, and those new to his work can look forward to a solid piece of investigative journalism that reads very much like a thriller. While primarily a painstaking reportage on the operation that led to Escobar's 1992-1993 downfall at the hands of a US-trained and supported Colombian secret police "Search Bloc" employing state of the art eavesdropping devices and an alleged shoot first/ask questions later methodology, there's much more here than meets the eye. Bowden does a magnificent job at recounting the grim parade of assassinated political leaders, judges, reporters and others who spoke out against the violence during Colombia's reign of terror, but to his credit he doesn't shy away from questioning whether the end actually justified the means in this case either. Recognizing that Escobar might have avoided justice indefinitely but for the counter-terror campaign against him waged by an equally violent vigilante group with other drug cartel ties called Los Pepes, Killing Pablo ends with the uncomfortable suggestion that this rival death squad's spree of targeted assassinations and intimidation bombings probably worked hand in hand with the Search Bloc in going after human targets knowingly or unknowingly provided by US intelligence personnel--with little or no ultimate impact on the flow of cocaine into the United States.

• Bowden, Mark. Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw. New York: Penguin, 2001. (http://www.penguinputnam.com/)

(NB: This is an alternate choice for one of my Back to History Challenge selections. The original list of books to be reviewed can be found here.)

Encounters at the End of the World

Encounters at the End of the World
Directed by Werner Herzog
USA, 2007

With Herzog's Grizzly Man, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, and the incomparable My Best Fiend already entrenched on my list of all-time documentary favorites, I needed very little persuasion to check out his new doc on the big screen last Sunday night. While seemingly more straightforward than any of those efforts, Encounters still rates high in the entertainment department, blending the director's usual questioning of man's relationship to nature with some simply spectacular footage taken aboveground and underwater in Antarctica. Herzog gets off a couple of trademark blasts at "tree-huggers," "whale-huggers" and the makers of cute penguin movies during the course of the film, but most of the time this most idiosyncratic of humanists wisely chooses to let the images and the interviewees speak for themselves. Not that this is all fun and games. Since many among the scientists and support staff on camera confide that they're resigned to man's impending doom on the planet or suggest that they wound up on the icy continent because they didn't want any part of civilization as we know it in the first place, the result is a blend of the ethereal and the apocalyptic that's much more unsettling than its humble G rating would lead you to believe.

Viewed at the Kendall Square Cinema (Cambridge, MA) on 7/6/08.

Asphalt

Asphalt (2006 DVD)
Directed by Joe May
Germany, 1929
Silent with English intertitles

While Joe May's nowhere near the household name that Lang, Murnau and Pabst are among silent movie aficionados (at least not outside of Ferdinand von Galitzien's Teutonic household, that is!), it's hard for me to imagine a much more satisfying nitrate from the era than Asphalt in terms of the sheer entertainment value on display here. From its dazzling opening scenes of a bustling Berlin shifting from daytime to nighttime right before your eyes to its claustrophobic finale depicting one character's lonesome walk into an uncertain future, this is just a joy to behold on both the visual and narrative planes. First-time viewers of the DVD should be prepared to be seduced.

It helps that Betty Amann and Gustav Fröhlich are perfectly cast as the vivacious jewel thief and no-nonsense traffic cop who seem to fall for each other after he's arrested her, but shots like this clever mirror image above do a nice job of complementing the script's tendency to keep the characters' emotional connection uncertain. Does Amann's Else Kramer really fall in love with Frölich's Officer Holk or is she just trading on her undeniable good looks to beat the rap? Could there be such a thing as love at first sight between a career cop and an unrepentant criminal? And given this temptress' Lulu-like combination of charm and sensuality, would it be fair for any man to blame Holk for putting the possibility of love with her ahead of his ethical responsibility to enforce the law? May and ace cinematographer Günther Rittau manage to entertain all these questions while entertaining you, the viewer, but I was actually hooked like Holk as soon as Amann walked onscreen. Good thing I'm not a cop with a conscience!

femme fatale

(noun, see Betty Amann in Asphalt)

(http://www.kino.com/)

Ina Caro's Languedoc

Carcassonne: Cité Médiévale et Pont vieux

(image: Mairie de Carcassonne)

Although I've only spent two days in the Languedoc [Occitan: Lengadòc] in my entire life, the region has had a hold on my imagination out of all proportion to what you might make of that. Ina Caro's chapter on the area in The Road from the Past: Traveling Through History in France (1994) was one of the first books that got me hooked on the subject, a point I was reminded of while rereading the section in question over the weekend. Essentially a collection of six mini-travelogues on visits to Saint-Roman, Narbonne [Narbona], the Abbey of Fontfroide, Carcassonne [Carcassona], Albi [Albi], and the "pilgrimage churches" of Conques and Rocamadour, this spotlight on Languedoc obviously benefits from Caro's graceful prose and pleasantness as a travel companion. However, her novel approach to the genre--deciding to "visit these sites in the order they were built" in order for the reader to "feel almost as if you are traveling through the past" (Caro, p. 2)--adds an historical dimension to the writing that makes the reading experience so much richer. A lack of footnotes and at least one overly-confident assertion of a disputed 13th century "fact" (Caro claims that Simon de Montfort murdered Raymond-Roger Trencavel of Carcassonne, a point not in agreement with contemporary source Guilhelms de Tudela nor accepted by all modern historians either) tarnish the historiographic value of the work to a certain extent, but this is otherwise a great place to read about modern touring in the Languedoc région informed by a narrative that also travels from Roman times to the aftermath of the Albigensian crusades. Cool!

• Caro, Ina. "Languedoc." In The Road from the Past: Traveling Through History in France. San Diego and New York: Harvest, 1994, 55-111.

A Séance with Countess Dusy Told

As some of you already know, I have another blog, Gambling with Countess Dusy Told, that I started last month with the idea that it'd be an all-movie sort of thing free of the "distractions" of languages, literature and the like. While I now ponder killing that blog off Dr. Mabuse style and bringing all the movie reviews back home to Caravana (their ancestral home before my recent caffeine binge anyway), here are some links to the non-French/non-Spanish films viewed for Gambling in June. In the meantime, is it really cold in here or is it just me?

• A Cottage on Dartmoor (Anthony Asquith, 1929)
• Die Nibelungen (Fritz Lang, 1924)
• Anna Boleyn (Ernst Lubitsch, 1920)
• The Most Dangerous Game (Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel, 1932)