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I first appreciated Jean Vigo’s “L’Atalante” when I watched it as part of the “Cannes Classics” 2017 programme. And by that I mean that there is a possibility I have watched it before and not have understood (despite my many years in Paris doing Film Studies, unfortunately…). For those who do not know, “Cannes Classics” is a part of the annual Cannes Film Festival. It was created around fifteen years ago in order to honour cinematographic classics and the various restoration works done to them at a time when the history of cinema seemed threatened by its entry into the age of digital technology. “L’Atalante” features on many best-of lists and its filming and editing techniques, considered ahead of its time, have later inspired many of the directors of the Nouvelle Vague. The film was heavily mutilated for commercial release in the past and once even had another title, “Le chaland qui passe”, “The barge that goes by” in English, sharing its name with a song by Lys Gauty, very popular at that time. This song does not appear in the film, which instead features musical compositions by the brilliant Maurice Jaubert. Cinematography is done by Boris Kaufman, the brother of Dziga Vertov and also the cinematographer on Jean Vigo’s previous works. It is the fourth and final film of the director, who was so sick at the time of post production that he sometimes had to edit the film from a stretcher. He died from tuberculosis shortly after the premier of the film in 1934, at the young age of 29 years old. The cast includes the legendary Dita Parlo and the prolific Michel Simon. Despite its liberal façade, “L’Atalante” is a film that explores the difficulties of conjugal love. A newly-wed couple, Jean and Juliette, played by Dita Parlo and Jean Dasté, decide to live on Jean’s canal boat, “L’Atalante”, after their marriage along with the boat’s crew, the elderly Père Jules, played by Michel Simon, and his cats and a younger cabin boy. All starts out good but soon telltale signs of marital problems start to appear. The bride seems to find her married life on board stifling thus when “L’Atalante” arrives in Paris, she is thrilled. The couple leaves the boat for a tour of the city, which comes abruptly to an end when Jean becomes jealous of a peddler’s attention on his wife. Soon after their return on the boat, Juliette slips away to the city and feeling betrayed, Jean leaves without her. Juliette finds herself lost in a city that is now foreign and even unsafe. Eventually Père Jules sets out to find Juliette and with the two lovers reunited, “L’Atalante” continues its journey. I have to admit that I had a difficult time writing the synopsis because the film seems more about subtexts than an actual story. The beginning of the film, featuring the banalities of married life and slowly revealing the flaws in each character, serves well in setting up the premise but pales in comparison to the later parts of the film, with perhaps the two greatest scenes of visual poetry in cinema history, the dream-like sequence of Juliette underwater and the sequence which alternates between the two lovers tossing and turning in their respective beds while they are physically apart but visually “put together”. It is here, through Jean Vigo’s metaphorical portrayal of heartache and daring hint at erotism (rare for French cinema at that time), that we finally understand and feel the love shared by Jean and Juliette. Michel Simon steals the limelight as the eccentric Père Jules. The actor successfully immerses himself in the numerous façades of his character – the cat lover, the old sailor battered by life experiences and even a possible love interest for the bored Juliette and finally gives his best performance when he demonstrates to the couple what he knows about wrestling. With “L’Atalante”, Jean Vigo showcases his mastery of cinema, a skill that has been adulated and imitated through the years but never surpassed. Unfortunately while he was still alive the director never received the fame that he so deserved despite his professionalism and talent but was instead hugely restricted by censorship and other demands from his producers (a time which ironically the notion of “auteur” does not seem to exist in France). Hopefully the fact that he got to work with the few of the industry’s greatest assets at that point of time, Maurice Jaubert, Boris Kaufman and Michel Simon was good enough a reward for the cinéaste and judging from his passion for his art, it probably was.

“Tunnel” is the third film directed by Kim Seong-hoon, with his second being the inventive “Hard day” which played at Cannes’ Director’s Fortnight in 2014. The film is an adaptation of a novel of the same name by So Jae-Won. Like his previous film, “Tunnel” is a critic of society, this time condemning media rapaciousness and government incompetency, perhaps an influence of the Sewol Ferry Disaster, a tragedy that took place around the same time as the production of the film. For instance the character of the minister, a symbol of government inefficiency in the film, is initially not present in the novel. The film is a box-office hit in South Korea, attracting more than seven million spectators to the cinemas. It also features a star-studded cast, with Ha Jeong-woo, Bae Doona and Oh Dal-su in the principal roles. In order to create the claustrophobic atmosphere, Ha Jeong-woo is filmed in an actual car destroyed by huge rocks, like in an actual tunnel accident. The lights sources are also restricted to those only available in such a situation, such as the headlights of cars and the torch that the character Lee Jung-soo carries. Finally the scenes in the tunnel are mostly shot in close-ups. Ha Jeong-woo plays the average Joe, Lee Jung-soo, a car salesman and the father of a young daughter. On the way home with his daughter’s birthday cake, he enters a tunnel which collapses soon after his entry, trapping him with little but the cake, some bottles of water he previously bought from a petrol station and a mobile phone that miraculously still has signal. Rescue operations led by a dedicated expert Dae-kyung, played by Oh Dal-su, begin under the close scrutiny of the members of the press who are more concerned with coverage of the catastrophe than the survival of the victim. Plans are delayed by inept government officials who are more of talk than action and even foiled by unprofessional tunnel constructors who fail to provide accurate information. Bae Doona plays Jung-soo’s wife, Se-Hyun, who serves as Jung-soo’s main source of mental support through such adverse times. At two hours and seven minutes, the film seems long for its limited setting of a single survivor in a seemingly hopeless situation. And since “Tunnel” goes straight to business – the tunnel collapses in a bare few minutes after the film starts, the plot tends to drag a bit towards the end. Some of the melodramatic sequences, especially a death that happens midway (I try not to give anything away…), remind me too much of mainstream Korean drama and seem unnecessary. Weirdly, the film’s premise closely resembles Billy Wilder’s “Ace in the hole” (1961) although in interviews the director does not seem aware of its predecessor. Maybe because in the face of the Sewol Ferry Disaster, the label of social satire seems more suitable than that of a remake. The talented Bae Doona is impressive in her role as a distraught wife. Although the actress only appears for a short duration each time, she always summons up just the right intensity of emotions for audience to identify and thus empathise with her character. Still the film is overall a clever piece of work. Kim Seong-hoon does a good job alternating between the victim’s sorry plight in the rubble and the real world outside the tunnel with its unsympathetic and nearing inhumane members of the media and government. He also successfully balances a heavy theme with the right dose of humour; the choice of casting the seemingly upbeat Ha Jeong-woo is a good one. With its a-list cast (let us not forget its possible impact on the box-office), unique and exciting genre experience and attentive cinematography, there is really no reason why you should not be catching “Tunnel”.

And also this!

I read this interview to prepare for my writing of the film review!

Stephen King probably helped a lot when he mentioned the film on Twitter and knowing that, the production has quoted him on the film poster. “The autopsy of Jane Doe” even sometimes reminds me of Stephen King’s writing in how the film manages to build up an extraordinary amount of dramatic tension which largely counts for its success. André Ovredal is a Norwegian director who rose to local acclaim in 2010 with the now cult film “Troll Hunter”, a found footage film described as a mockumentary. Unlike his previous work, “The autopsy of Jane Doe” is of the horror genre and the action mostly takes place in a contained environment, the “Tilden morgue and crematorium”. In interviews, Ovredal has mentioned “The Conjuring” of James Wan with its back to basics style of horror as inspiration and Hitchcock’s way of creating suspense as guidance in making the film. Despite the huge amount of dramatic tension, the plot is rather simple and thus a bit disappointing; the film title “The autopsy of Jane Doe” basically sums up the entire film. It starts off with a crime scene where one of the police officers observes that there are no signs of forced entry and instead it seems like the victims were trying to escape from the house. Under the instructions of Sheriff Sheldon Burke, an unidentified female body, played by Olsen Kelly, buried in the basement is sent to the local morgue where father and son, Tommy and Austin Tilden, played respectively by Brian Cox and Emile Hirsch, are to perform an autopsy and find out the cause of death before the next morning. The body, unidentified and thus named “Jane Doe” by the pair, proves to be a puzzle as its appearance and injuries cannot seem to be explained by Science. Establishing themselves as firm believers of logic, the two coroners continue the autopsy despite the increasingly alarming signs of an unfriendly supernatural presence. As the film proceeds, the signs turn into actual attacks on the Tilden and tragedy ensues. What makes the story so believable is also the dedicated performances of the actors. Literally the poster girl of the film, Olwen Kelly credits her yoga training for her ability to withstand the long hours without movement and with shallow breathing when she played the corpse. Brian Cox is a convincing experienced coroner as he confidently recites the various scientific observations that he makes about “Jane Doe” and later shows a more human side of his character as he eventually becomes an unfortunate victim of the supernatural presence. Emile Hirsch plays the many sides to his character well, switching easily from the inquisitive coroner apprentice to nice boyfriend to filial son as the story progresses, although the film, unfortunately, seems to attribute very little to developing its characters. We know that the two Mr. Tilden-s are still upset about Mrs. Tilden’s death because they discuss it in one of the sequences but few other details about the characters, for example how is Mrs. Tilden’s death related to the main plot of the film, are given. Thus during the sequence when Austin eventually mourns the death of one of his closed one, we find it difficult to participate in his grief. As the film progresses, the cycle of anticipation, tragedy, catharsis and then back to normalcy gets a bit too obvious and repetitive. However “The autopsy of Jane Doe” has done such a good job during the first half of the film that even now as I am writing about the film, any bit of silence in my room reminds me of the moments of silence in the morgue in the film and makes me feel as if something bad is about to happen.

Watched "The curious incident of the dog in the night-time" and I absolutely love the set.

Derrière les coulisses du tournage d'une pub. C'est une publicité de la société de Moonwalk Films.

Keep the lights on, directed by Ira Sachs, is a 1h 41min drama film starring the talented Thur Lindhart and Zachary Booth as a homosexual couple. Lindhart, in the role of Erik, is Danish and a documentary filmmaker while Booth, in the role of Paul, is an American lawyer. Paul has drug abuse problems, which subjects their relationship to the various turmoils and heartbreaks on top of the usual societal constraints that gay couples nowadays still face. Ira Sachs, along with Mauricio Zacharias, wrote the screenplay. The director was inspired by a previous 10-year relationship and he is once again on the subject of homosexuality after his first film, The Delta. And like his previous works, Sachs once again explores the intimity and the problems in a relationship. It is a beautiful film, full of hippic expressions, like the art exhibitions that they watch, the music (Arthur Russell), the bag carried by Booth. The film started off straight into the topic, and sort of trailed off silently into an ending that doesn't quite surprise anybody. The thing is it's refreshing how openly the idea of intimacy between two homosexuals are expressed but there are no elements of surprise where same-sex relationships and drug abuse come into contact and hinder the growth of the relationship. Still, it is an independent film and it has succeeded in its genre by bringing out all the little facts of life, phoning hotlines to look for sex when one is lonely, having an aging female friend who proposes making a baby not out of love but of necessity. In addition, the clever choice of actors helps to bring out the different sentiments, the highs and lows of the lovers, much needed in a troubled relationship like this one. I thoroughly enjoyed Thur Lindhart's performance.

It may be interesting as a book, but a bit too long (1h45min, I started checking for the time in the middle of the railway scene) and too visual for an adaptation cinematographic.

It's hard not to fall in love with a couple as handsome as Rachel Weisz and Tom Hiddleston, especially in this image.

So anyway, yup. I liked the film because it was scary and kept me to my seat to the last minute. To hell with the critics.

I really enjoyed this film. Greatly successful as a drama.

Makoto Tokashi plays Mitsuko. She looked very scary throughout the film.

Les enfants de belle ville (2004); Iran; directed by Asghar Farhadi

Bref, the story scored like 98/100 so I don't have any reason to go observe the camera and the sound.

So yup, I'll just end with I love the show but it could be better, not Westfeldt's best effort.