Popcorn & Candy: War & Penance
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
This underrated masterpiece by Jean-Pierre Melville received a belated theatrical release in the U.S. earlier this spring. Belated by nearly a half-century, as it was originally released in 1961, and for some reason had never been distributed in the U.S. It still hasn't been released here on DVD, an oversight that will hopefully soon be remedied now that the film has made some all-too-brief rounds. The titular priest here is played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, probably the French actor of that era who looked least like a priest. Watching him here in his frock is a little jarring, as we're more used to him as a thug or a hustler, and his youth and raggedly dangerous good looks seem out of place here. It works to marvelous advantage in a story about a priest with a strange attachment to counseling young women – women who inevitably fall for him. Morin, however, never succumbs; it's as if he's constantly leading himself to temptation, and then delivering himself from evil.
Despite the title, this isn't really Leon's story, as it is more concerned with Barny (Emmanuelle Riva), a widowed mother and a Communist relocated by the war to this small village in occupied France during WWII. She's a long-lapsed Catholic, and only enters Morin's confessional booth to tell him and his religion off; when he responds calmly and intellectually, it begins an interaction that challenges both his beliefs and her non-beliefs. It's a work of beautiful subtlety from Melville, with a strong undercurrent of sexual, political, and philosophical tension.
Also worth mentioning, while we're talking about French films at the National Gallery, is the museum's Alain Resnais retrospective, which kicks off this weekend, runs for the next two weeks, and covers all phases of his long career. Bad news, though, for those who were looking forward to Hiroshima mon amour this weekend; that's been cancelled and replaced by Je t'aime, je t'aime, but the subsequent screening of the incomparable Last Year at Marienbad is still on schedule.
View the trailer.
Léon Morin screens Sunday at 4:30 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art. Also at the National Gallery, the museum's Alain Resnais retrospective begins Saturday afternoon and runs until September 20. Free.
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Cinema & the Spanish Civil War
Repressive political regimes have always been effective catalysts for great works of art. The Spanish Civil War in particular, and the brutal fascist regime of Francisco Franco that it installed for nearly 40 years, served to inspire some of the greatest art and literature of the 20th century. The AFI, in conjunction with the Embassy of Spain and the British Film Institute, has assembled an impressively diverse array of the films specifically about that war, its aftermath, or using them as a backdrop. Highlights include Ken Loach's typically fiery Land and Freedom, Alain Resnais' atypically straightforward (and thrilling) The War is Over, and perhaps the best of the bunch, Victor Erice's moving visual poem The Spirit of the Beehive. One might quibble that some excellent recent films have been left out of the mix here: neither of Guillermo del Toro's Spanish Civil War fantasies made the cut, nor the award winning 1998 Fernando Trueba comedy The Girl of Your Dreams. But with such a great lineup, it's hard to complain. Worth noting is that there is but one Hollywood product anywhere on the list, the 1943 Gary Cooper/Ingrid Bergman adaptation of For Whom the Bell Tolls. One wonders if studio reluctance to tackle a subject that captivated the rest of the international cultural community might have had anything to do with the United States' rather embarrassing alliance of convenience with a fascist dictatorship during the Cold War.
Opens Friday at the AFI and runs until September 22. See the AFI's site for a full schedule.
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Continuing this week's parade of films focusing on anti-fascist conflicts, we have The Baader Meinhof Complex, about the Red Army Faction, a militant leftist group that sprang up in West Germany on the heels of the late-1960s European youth & intellectual fascination with Maoism. The RAF was perhaps the most violent group to spring from that movement, and long lived to boot: their attacks on what they viewed as a West Germany still mired in the fascist roots of the Third Reich spanned the better part of 30 years, well into the mid-1990s. The group has been the subject of numerous filmic treatments over the years, and this latest, an adaptation of the German bestseller of the same name, concentrates on the formation of the group in the late '60s, and their activities up through late '70s. The film's director, Uli Edel, has had an up and down career, largely in American television, since an acclaimed early film career, and this represents his first feature back in his native Germany since 1981's Christiane F.. In a promising note for the film's potential impartiality, leftists have decried the film as unsympathetic toward the group, and those on the right have said it paints too attractive a picture.
View the trailer.
Opens next Friday, September 11, at E Street, but the Goethe Institut is hosting a preview this Tuesday. $6
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Is it stretching too much to associate Easy Rider's anti-authoritarianism with the more overtly political anti-fascist conflicts that are a part of all the above movies? Maybe, though the youth political culture of the late 1960s in the U.S., while not as trenchantly leftist as its European counterparts, certainly can't be separated from the hippie/drug cultures that Easy Rider depicts. The movie is strange to watch now, as it celebrates its 40th anniversary. Hindsight tells us that this was not only the most perfect 90-minute distillation of the cultural forces pulling on America's fringes in the late '60s, but that it also heralded the beginning of a new age of daring in Hollywood. Yet it doesn't feel like a movie that ever had aspirations to be as important as it became. Taking away those hindsight glasses, it's simply a fast, loose, stream of consciousness road movie about two free spirits drifting across the American landscape, celebrating all the potential this country has to offer. Their journey ends with a symbolically weighty look at the less savory flipside to the American consciousness. With hindsight back in place, the quick death of the "new" Hollywood at the hands of moneyed interests in less than a decade carries a sad parallel to the final moments of the film that kicked off that brief era.
View the trailer.
Opens Friday for one week only with a brand new 35mm print to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the film at the AFI.
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Mike Judge's latest is being billed as a "return to the workplace", presumably trying to cash in on the massive cult following for his 1999 classic Office Space – a following that didn't exactly turn out for the extremely limited release of 2006's Idiocracy, a film I really wanted to like, but found brilliant in concept only, and somewhat lacking in execution. In Extract, Jason Bateman plays the owner of a vanilla extract factory, who, much like Office Space's hero, finds himself unsatisfied at work and at home. Eventually he engages in an elaborate and ill-advised ploy that will give him the justification to cheat on his wife. We're guessing things don't go quite as planned. You kind of have to feel a little bad for Judge, always working in the shadow of a movie that everyone loves, but that never made much money. Making well-loved financial failures doesn't endear you to studio execs, so here's hoping the "return to the workplace" is also a return to what made his first film so funny, and a return that actually brings out the audience.
View the trailer. Or, better yet, watch Beavis & Butthead's take on the film.
Opens Friday at a number of theaters throughout the area.