Alliance Française schedule

At Alliance Française on Fridays at 8 pm

At Alliance Française on Friday, January 23: Trafic / Traffic (1971) by Jacques Tati – 96 mins – Italy/ France Comedy. No English subtitles. Reviews: Universal acclaim: 81 out of 100.

With Jacques Tati, Maria Kimberly, Marcel Fraval.

French comedian/director Jacques Tati once again assumes his "M. Hulot" characterization. This time, the ever-bemused Hulot is assigned to deliver an all-purpose recreational vehicle to an Amsterdam auto show. As Hulot, his driver and the auto company's PR woman set out for the France-to-Holland motor trip, they encounter just about every sort of car-related misadventure known to man, from a slapsticky traffic jam to a malfunctioning service station. Upon arriving in Amsterdam, they learn that the auto show has ended, and now they've got to take the same perilous trip back!

Though not Jacques Tati's best effort, Traffic contains some wonderful sight gags tied in with the theme of modern man's subservience to Technology.

– Alliance description

Chicago Reader: Traffic is a masterpiece in its own right--not only for the sharp picture of the frenetic and gimmick-crazy civilization that worships cars, but also for many remarkable formal qualities: an extraordinary use of sound (always one of Tati's strong points), a complex interplay of chance and control in the observations of everyday behavior, and, in some spots, a development of the use of multiple focal points to articulate some of the funniest gags.

At Alliance Française on Friday, January 30: La Grande vadrouille / Don't Look Now - We're Being Shot at (1966) by Gérard Oury – 132 mins – France/ UK Comedy. No English subtitles.

With Bourvil, Louis de Funès, Terry Thomas, Claudio Brook, Andréa Parisy, Colette Brosset.

Augustin Bouvet, painter and Stanislas Lefort, conductor at the Paris Opera, were leading a quiet life in wartime Paris. Until the day they take charge of three British airmen shot down over the city.

A British bomber is shot down over Paris by the Germans. Its crew (Terry Thomas as a flight captain) land there by parachute. With the help of some French civilians (Louis de Funès in the role of a conductor and Bourvil as a house painter) they try to escape over the demarcation line into the southern part of France, still not occupied by the Germans.

– Alliance description

Paris 1943. Three Allied parachutists land unexpectedly and turn upside-down the peaceful lives of Stanislas, a conductor, and Augustin, a decorator. The only way to get rid of their unwanted guests is to lead them to the free zone. This was the highest-grossing film in France for more than thirty years!

IMDb viewer: One of the most popular French movies of all time! Starring the famous Bourvil/Louis de Funes tandem it is a highly entertaining caper set in WWII German-occupied France, where these two unlikely heroes reluctantly must help some downed British airmen to escape.

A perennial favorite on French TV during the Christmas or Easter holidays it is one of those rare movies you can watch over and over again without getting tired of it. It runs more than two hours but moves along at an incredible pace. Movie relies big time on the clash of character between de Funes as the self-important musical director of the Opéra de Paris and Bourvil as the simple housepainter. But also the hilarious script, some spectacular set pieces (including a spielbergesque chase by German sidecars) and a surprising finale all add up to making Vadrouille one of the best and most entertaining French movies ever.

Made on a lavish budget by Gerard Oury who would go on to make some other highly successful comedies, mostly starring big French stars as de Funes and Bourvil, but also Jean-Paul Belmondo, Pierre Richard and Christian Clavier. Up to that time movies made in France took war rather seriously, but La Grande vadrouille sparked of an endless string of farces set in WWII which almost invariably depicted the French as very clever and cunning, always outwitting the Germans in the end.

At Alliance Française on Friday, February 6: La Grande illusion / The Grand Illusion (1937) by Jean Renoir – 114 mins – France Drama/ War. Black and white. English subtitles.

With Jean Gabin, Erich von Stroheim, Pierre Fresnay.

During 1st WW, two French officers are captured. Captain de Boeldieu is an aristocrat while Lieutenant Maréchal was a mechanic in civilian life. They meet other prisoners from various backgrounds, as Rosenthal, son of wealthy Jewish bankers. They are separated from Rosenthal before managing to escape. A few months later, they meet again in a fortress commanded by the aristocrat Van Rauffenstein. De Boeldieu strikes up a friendship with him but Maréchal and Rosenthal still want to escape.

– Alliance description

Calling on his own experiences as an aviator in WWI as well as those of his comrades, this is Jean Renoir's antiwar masterpiece. Reviews: Universal acclaim: 92 out of 100.

Roger Ebert: It's a meditation on the collapse of the old order of European civilization. Perhaps that was always a sentimental upper-class illusion, the notion that gentlemen on both sides of the lines subscribed to the same code of behavior. Whatever it was, it died in the trenches of World War I.

Film Space schedule

At Film Space: on Saturdays at 7 pm

Film Space in January is presenting a series of films by some directors they like, who also star in these films.

Film Space is to the right and in the back of the CMU Art Museum, in the Media Arts and Design building across from the ballet school. Now that the weather is cool, they are resuming their rooftop showings, weather permitting. You might want to bring something to sit on or lie on. A contribution is requested in the donation box at the entrance. Well worth supporting.

Saturday, January 24: Hana-bi / Fireworks (1997) by Takeshi Kitano – 103 mins – Japan Crime/ Drama/ Thriller. In Japanese, English subtitles. Reviews: Universal acclaim: 81 out of 100.

A simultaneously tender and violent masterwork from Takeshi, one of Japan's most popular entertainers. My friend Donald Richie describes it this way in his book A Hundred Years of Japanese Film: A Concise History:

Over-the-hill cop (Kitano) feels dreadful at having let down a police buddy and at the same time neglected a dying wife. He robs a bank to get some money to make amends and scrubs out a gang in the process . . . Kitano's aesthetic take on trendy anarchy has here been turned into something like an art form.

Richie says that it is common in Kitano’s films to have “minimal acting by the director and over-the-top melodramatics by everyone else.” That surely is the case here!

Roger Ebert: The pattern of the movie is: Ordinary casual life, punctuated by sharp, clinical episodes of violence. Nishi hardly speaks (there is little dialogue in the film), and his face shows almost no expression (reportedly because of injuries to Kitano in a motorcycle crash). He is like a blank slate that absorbs the events in the film without giving any sign that he has registered them. When he attacks, he gives no warning; the wrong trigger word releases his rage.

The film is an odd viewing experience. It lacks all of the narrative cushions and hand-holding that we have come to expect. It doesn't explain, because an explanation, after all, is simply something arbitrary the story has invented.

About Film, Carlo Cavagna: If we accept that Japanese art favors minimalism and understatement, then Fireworks must surely be one of the most Japanese films ever. Writer/director/star Takeshi Kitano makes movies that marry poetic beauty with vicious, unglamorous violence — static, understated movies about existences wasted, and rediscovering the joy of being, for a brief time, alive. Rather than a constant presence (overt or implied), violence comes in sudden bursts, as a shocking interruption.

Fireworks concerns Nishi (Kitano), an oft-decorated detective who leaves his partner Horibe (Ren Osugi) alone on a stakeout to visit his terminally ill wife (Kayoko Kishimoto), during which time Horibe is shot and paralyzed. Nishi's subsequent vendetta inadvertently results in the killing of another detective, Tanaka and the wounding of a third, Nakamura. Wracked by guilt and disgusted by the police force's failure to nurture its own, Nishi quits to provide for his colleagues and ease his wife's last days — by any means necessary.

The second half of the film takes an odd Kitano turn, as Nishi and his wife rediscover the simple delights of relaxing at the beach or fooling around with a deck of cards. They play. They set off simple fireworks in a field, whose sudden bursts in the tranquil countryside are like Nishi himself, calm, easily contented, yet explosively violent when set off. Yet even in quiet moments, an aching melancholy lingers between Nishi and his wife, attributable both to her terminal illness and to the recent death of their young child. Death for Nishi, in the form of the yakuza loan sharks hunting him, is also never far away.

As he has in other movies, Kitano the director puts Kitano the actor at the center of Fireworks, where he performs with a disconcerting impassivity. His favorite reaction shot is an expressionless close-up of himself. He never seems to say anything. Rather, other people say things to him. He waits, he considers, and when the moment is right, he acts, with forceful, bloody determination.

Hideo Yamamoto's camera is equally impassive. It rarely pans and almost never zooms. Often Yamamoto and Kitano establish a shot for a second before the action moves into it, and allow the shot to continue running for a moment after the action has left, much as Kurosawa does. This technique serves to emphasize the permanence of the surroundings and the impermanence of the people who pass through them, suggesting life is short. Find ways to enjoy it, Kitano is saying, even if the enjoyment cannot last.

This is where Kitano is a social critic. In Japan, the conformist pressure to dedicate your life to an employer, and to always do your duty, is [very strong]. Nishi and his colleagues spill their blood for the police and the public good, and what do they get in return? Whatever disability payments Horibe might be receiving are insufficient even to buy painting supplies, not that he has any idea how to enjoy his new hobby, which he regards only as a way of passing the time. Work is all Horibe has ever known. Nakamura echoes this sentiment when he observes a girl running with a kite on a beach, and remarks, "I could never live like that." Evidently pensions and medical benefits also leave a lot to be desired, because Tanaka's widow is reduced to working at a fast food counter, and Nishi has borrowed millions of yen to pay for his wife's treatments.

Kitano never expresses any of his opinions straightforwardly — or the plot, for that matter. Like his impassive protagonist, Kitano says little, and he feeds us the story piecemeal, sometimes via flashbacks spliced into the film with no commentary. It takes a good half hour to forty-five minutes before even the basic premise is discernible. The film is like the dots on Horibe's pointillist painting — Kitano fills in a bit here and a bit there, in no particular order but with painstaking attention to detail, and the big picture gradually emerges. Horibe's artwork in the movie is actually Kitano's own work, much of it serenely whimsical, from the primitive paintings at the hospital to Horibe's figures of animals with flower buds in the place of their heads or eyes. Kitano often juxtaposes a thing — raindrops, cherry blossoms, and, of course, fireworks — with a painting of the thing. Life and art are the same, indistinguishable, like the shot of a blue Mount Fuji set against a blue sky, looking exactly like a two-dimensional Japanese print. The most arresting artwork in the film, though, is a large painting of a snowy landscape at night that, similar to a pointillist work, is actually composed of a multitude of tiny kanji (Japanese) characters that spell out each element of the painting (e.g., the snow is made up of tiny characters that mean "snow"). In the middle, splashed in red, a much larger character violently mars the painting's tranquility. If you haven't yet seen the film, it is best that you find out what the character represents for yourself. The tone of the painting, however, corresponds to the tone of the film. For Kitano, human life is like one of Nishi's fireworks in the countryside — it begins as a spark, then explodes as a momentary, ferociously intense flash in an otherwise serene world.

Saturday, January 31: Annie Hall (1977) by Woody Allen – 93 mins – US Comedy/ Romance. In English. Reviews: Universal acclaim: 88 out of 100.

Filled with poignant performances and devastating humor, Annie Hall represented a quantum leap for Woody Allen and remains an American classic.

Rotten Tomatoes: Often considered the crown jewel in a highly acclaimed and prolific film career, Annie Hall is Woody Allen's only film to have won the Academy Award for Best Picture. This recognition, however, is not what makes the film significant. Annie Hall marks the beginning of the second phase of Allen's career as a filmmaker, abandoning the slapstick of Sleeper and Bananas for more thoughtful comedies (and eventually dramas) that explored human relationships and psychology. Allen's capacity as a creative filmmaker had also grown with the film, as he utilized creative subtitles, split screens, and animation, as well as evincing a sophisticated understanding of the potential of editing and camera movement for comic effect--consider the cutaway to Allen's character Alvy Singer, as seen through the eyes of "Grammy Hall" during the dinner sequence, or shortly afterward the slow pan to Alvy in the passenger seat of a car driven by Annie's unhinged brother Duane. The film is a brutally honest assessment of the prospects of a relationship between two very different people. Allen's Alvy is (like the filmmaker himself) an introverted, neurotic intellectual and a complete mismatch for Diane Keaton's vivacious, flaky Annie Hall. Although the romance is undoubtedly the center of the film, it affords Allen the opportunity to contrast his beloved New York culture with that of the Midwest, where Annie comes from, and Los Angeles, which tempts Annie with the possibility of fame and success as a singer. The city of New York itself plays an important part for the first time in an Allen film, with a great deal of location shooting that serves to highlight the city's character and atmosphere. Finally, the many comedic cameos peppered through the film--from Truman Capote to Paul Simon to media theorist Marshall McLuhan--pay tribute to the deserved reputation that Allen had gained for himself.

February is designated “The Month of Iron Hoofter” by the Film Space curators! What is Iron Hoofter? Well it’s a rhyming allusion – Cockney rhyming slang. Hoofter rhymes with Poofter. Does that help?

Saturday, February 7: Spider Lilies / Ci qing (2007) by Zero Chou – 94 mins – Taiwan Drama/ Romance.

First off in the series: lesbian love and tattoos in Taipei.