RECOMMENDED

Mexican director Gerardo Naranjo’s brilliant, urgent “Miss Bala,” which was his country’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Film, and easily the best film of 2012 so far, is getting an abrupt release in the Chicago area after failing to make the final five for the Academy Awards. It’s under the Fox International banner, which co-produced the film with Canana, the Mexican production company whose principals include Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna, and it’s their first release in the U.S. “Miss Bala” is the propulsive story of a working-class woman in Baja California (Stephanie Sigman) who wants to enter a “Miss Baja” competition but who falls into a series of coincidences that send her on the run for the duration of the film after witnessing the murder of members of the drug cartel and DEA agents at a club. (“Bala” translates as “bullet.”) Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The 80-year-old Jean-Luc Godard’s “Film Socialisme” is a disarmingly beautiful rash of video imagery that ranges from HD in gleaming blues on a luxury liner late at night to cell-phone images that stutter, blanch and bleed, accompanied by murmorous dialogues turning over familiar political idées fixe and the crisp musique concrète-style sound mixes of his work of the past three decades. Godard hectors and cryptographs, finding an expressive character for his digital video palette with far greater success than his 2001 “Eloge de l’amour,” but with less engagement than in the recently reissued “Sauve qui peut (la vie)” (1980), shot on 35mm film, which works with metaphors of self-loathing, prostitution and misogyny. “Film Socialisme” is sketch comedy for cineastes (far less dense than the obsessive and potted essay “Histoires du Cinéma”), those who react to colors and edits and gestural repetitions and thematic fixations, but not those who struggle to cipher a story from fragments. His latest fractured fairytales are also filmmaking as sculpture, expressive through collage and not the verities of theater and text, film as a corrupted dream. (Oh! The nineteenth century!) Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

Contrails crosshatch and feather a deep blue sky to the sound of planes. A camera pointed upward, soon to come to earth to trace how the lives of three adults’ lives criss-cross.

Shocking and shockingly beautiful, Jean-Luc Godard’s “Every Man For Himself” [Sauve qui peut (la vie)] is as brutish as it is sensitive. First released in the U.S. in 1980, Godard called it his “second first film,” marking his return to European art-house film after a decade experimenting first with didactic political films and then with emerging video technology. Francis Coppola was the original U. S. distributor, and was set to produce an ill-fated American gangster movie by Godard, “The Story.”

Paul Godard (Jacques Dutronc) is a television filmmaker fighting with his girlfriend, Denise (Nathalie Baye), who cross paths with a prostitute, Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert). The camera’s gaze remains as simple as those opening shots. Blunt statements about power and sexual violence are threaded throughout, and are usually also in the service of describing filmmaking as being an equally brutal act. (The scenes of sexual display are largely absurd, including a Rube Goldberg-style roundelay in a hotel room that resembles a tableau from a late Fassbinder film as well as a mockery of how movies are directed.) Read the rest of this entry »

The Social Network

Top 5 Domestic Films
“The Social Network,” David Fincher
“Winter’s Bone,” Debra Granik
“Ghost Writer,” Roman Polanski
“Exit Through the Gift Shop,” Banksy
“Inception,” Christopher Nolan
— Ray Pride

Top 5 Foreign Films
“Carlos,” Olivier Assayas
“Everyone Else,” Maren Ade
“Dogtooth,” Yorgos Lanthimos
“Father of My Children,” Mia Hansen-Løve
“I Am Love,” Luca Guadagnino
— Ray Pride

Top 5 Films
“Animal Kingdom,” David Michôd
“Enter the Void,” Gaspar Noé
“Inception,” Christopher Nolan
“Lourdes,” Jessica Hausner
“Monsters,” Gareth Edwards
—Bill Stamets

Top 5 Documentary Films
“Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno,” Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea
“Sweetgrass,” (no director credited) [Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor]
“The Oath,” Laura Poitras
“Videocracy,” Erik Gandini
“Rembrandt’s J’Accuse,” Peter Greenaway
—Bill Stamets Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The Godardian knot: how can a nifty movie fifty years on seem so fresh? For its immersion in signifiers: of snips of pop culture passing for personality. Flip, fluid “Breathless” (Á bout de souffle), in a celluloid restoration with updated subtitles (with no current plans to replace the recent Criterion double disc) is kinetic sculpture in its form, its willful jump cuts (seldom seen in 1959) making light cubism of its story through editing. Drawing from the gangster cool of Bogart and doomed couple-on-the-run romanticism (from films like Joseph H. Lewis’ “Gun Crazy,” which used street locations with the same kind of punch), Godard, the film critic and intellectual, made splendid play of film grammar and fine faces. Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo), thick cigarette drooping from his full lips, smoke coiling across his thick boxer mug, is irrationally infatuated with American student Patricia (Jean Seberg), the grandmother of all “manic dream pixies,” peddling the New York Herald Tribune on Parisian streets. Cinematographer Raoul Coutard’s crunchy, granular black-and-white images (shooting with film meant for 35mm stills) are accompanied by the occasional tracking shot blatantly taken from a wheelchair being backed through pedestrian traffic. Godard was 30 at the time, and the 1960s would be filled with worship of muses like on-and-off-again love/wife Anna Karina, but his love of Jean Seberg’s slender neck is as cruelly erotic as anything he’s ever shot: positioned in a convertible’s back seat, her head three-quarter turned away, Godard photographs her as the eternal present, the center of all things, as the sights of Parisian street life stream past in a sustained series of jumpcuts. Director Jean-Pierre Melville, whose portrait of Montmartre nightlife, “Bob the Gambler,” gets a joke reference, appears as a pretentious novelist whose ambition, he says, is to become immortal, then die. He pulls down his sunglasses and the warm, huge pools of his eyes fix on Patricia. The sphinx, flustered, turns away, and as the image fades, faces us. 97m. (Ray Pride)

“Breathless” opens Friday at the Music Box.

RECOMMENDED

While some reviewers have disdained this never-released-in-the-U.S. Godard entry from 1966, “Made in U.S.A.” as a semi-coherent hodgepodge, it’s also been a kind of phantom limb for those who admire the Swissman’s prolific output from that time, immediately preceded by “Masculin féminin” (also 1966) and “Pierrot le fou” (1965) and succeeded by “Two or Three Things I Know About Her” (1967) and “La Chinoise” (also 1967). Complicated rights issues, largely centered on rights to the novel the movie’s kinda-sorta based on, kept it from public view since its New York Film Festival premiere in 1967. A whimsically nonsensical Cold War-era noir plot bobs into view amid the aphoristic cultural-capitalism critique, but Godard’s ideas about how to photograph youth and fads and ex-wife Anna Karina, dressed in bright bold primary colors against other bright bold primary colors, are a delightful eyeful, even if the movie never attains the heights of “Two or Three Things,” which was produced at the same time. A character says we’re watching “Walt Disney with blood,” and that might be right. The richness of the sound and image are enough for grateful ears and eyes, even if “Made” didn’t boast an offhanded café scene where Marianne Faithfull’s singing “As Tears Go By.” The Village Voice’s J. Hoberman wrote a book called “Vulgar Modernism”: here’s a visual concordance of the very idea. 88m. Widescreen. (Ray Pride)

RECOMMENDED

Godard’s crunchy 1962 masterpiece was only his fourth feature. But the mix of extended passages of meditative dialogue and striking, wordless stretches of beautifully observant visuals perhaps set the template for the work that’s come in the decades since. Nana Kleinfrankenheim (Anna Karina) stands in for Joan of Arc, Louise Brooks, modern woman, wife (Godard’s bride of the time). Politics, pop music, the human face: there’s so much to soak up in “Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux (My Life to Live: A Film in 12 Scenes).” Epigrams to take away: “Yes, he says, photography is truth, and cinema is the truth twenty-four times a second” and “Love can be a solution, if it is true,” and Nana’s refrain, “C’est comme ça” (“That’s the way it goes,” sort of), which also recurs in Bresson’s “Pickpocket.” Restored 35mm print. (Ray Pride)

RECOMMENDED
(Le Mépris, 1963) “Contempt,” a couple years on from its theatrical revival, is a revelation, an overlooked, shockingly accessible masterpiece amid Godard’s oft-challenging canon. Michel Piccoli plays Paul Javal, a playwright who needs money, and producer Prokosch is embodied by Jack Palance, that heavy among heavies, waving a packet of cash in Paul’s direction to doctor a script of “The Odyssey” that is being directed by Fritz Lang. “I like gods,” Palance purrs, “I like them very much.” Paul has a beautiful young wife, Camille, played with momentous petulance by Brigitte Bardot. Paul asks whether he should write the script. Camille tells him it’s fine. Later she feels he hasn’t shown enough concern when Prokosch has been forward with her. No matter what Paul does, it will not be enough. Camille seizes on excuses, any excuses, to dismiss Paul’s adoration. She remembers the love she once thought they had: “Everything used to happen instinctively, in complicitous ecstasy.” For a good third of the movie, the couple bicker, contradict, cut at each other in their brightly colored, unfinished apartment. The world is reduced to Paul and Camille. Man and Woman. The furniture is as bold, as blunt as sculpture. A cerulean chair, a sunflower-colored throw, a red couch. Statues. Bardot. Her body rebukes the viewer, Paul. “Do you love my breasts, my eyes, my knees?” she asks, as the camera, transfixed, goes beyond objectification into blunt fetish. “I love you totally, terribly, tragically,” is all Paul, smitten, ever-equivocating, can tell her. At the end, the camera looks out onto the ocean, the horizon. Limitless possibility or infinite distance? The space between you and I, the space between a man, a woman. The sparkling azure of the sea is the crashing gulf between them. It is unfathomably huge. 102m. Widescreen. (Ray Pride)