Le Vourdalak (2023) directed by Adrien Beau

 

It's hard to talk about this film without spoilers, it's has some interesting elements better experienced as a surprise. Spoiler free, this is a film about a nobleman finding shelter after being robbed on the road and getting caught up in a family's tragic story of death and horror. It is based on Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy's 1839 novella The Family of the Vourdalak. I had already read it before seeing this so I had an idea what was going to happen. It's mostly well acted, nicely filmed, slow and hypnotic with some scares and a villain that works when it really shouldn't. 

Spoilers

A vourdalak is basically a vampire and this movie is based on one of the oldest printed vampire stories. it follows much of the lore of the time it was written so its has some nice touches, like vampires eating their shrouds that add a creepier than normal feel to it. The grandfather leaves to fight in the war but warns the family that if he isn't back in 6 days, he has died and if he is seen again to reject him as he will have become a vourdalak. He returns just after the deadline and his son takes his emaciated body into the house despite the protestations of the family. 

The grandfather is a vampire like you haven't really seen in film. Sure he is a living corpse but he is also played by a life sized puppet. This should be comical but it isn't.. at all. It is done well but doesn't really hide that it's a puppet. It has charisma and does manage to scare the crap out of you a couple times. it does what traditional vampires did and begins to transform the rest of the family into undead creatures. 

The nobleman is seen as a dandy, at first. Over time he grows and we see more than a prissy rich guy but someone willing to combat the undead for the family that took him in. He is in love with the daughter but that takes a back seat when the grandfather goes after the young grandson. The film ends with a couple of surprises and strays from the original story but overall it is a good adaption. 

The father is played really well and the rest of the cast does too. The weakest link is the daughter/love interest. She is a too odd to get a sympathetic handle on. Vassili Schneider as the brother is another departure from the novella. He is sexually ambiguous in some ways, dressing like a woman at times but also strong when he needs to be. His family is accepting of him as he is and this normally admirable trait is definitely misplaced when the father accepts the grandfather back into the family. Being a vampire is a little beyond acceptance, in my opinion of course. 

The pace is slow but that helps the viewer accept what is happening and while there is some gore it's restrained. The filming is mostly subtle and natural. There is a night/day issue that crops up quite a bit and it's hard to get an idea if hours or days have passed. it's not a deal breaker as the story and actors really draw you in. 

Sylvie et le fantôme (1946) directed by Claude Autant-Lara

 

Sylvie is obsessed with the portrait of her grandmother's lover in the family estate and is distressed when her father sells it to pay some bills. There are stories that Alain, the man in the portrait haunts the estate and he does in fact do just that. Before the painting is hauled off he leaves it and begins walking around the house and sort of stalking Sylvie in a way not cool by today's standards. 

To make her feel better, her dad has a 16th birthday ball for her and hires a ghost visit her so she can feel better about losing the painting. Robbers and the son of the man who bought the painting are caught creeping around the estate one night but are mistaken for actors hired to play the ghost. The real actor arrives and they decide that 3  is better than one since he can instantly appear in different locations. The real ghost is till walking about as well. 

This is sort of needlessly complicated and I can see that it's light enough to watch and find some charm in it but I found it a bit banal. The best thing in for me were the effects. They used the same reflection effects Disney's Haunted mansion uses to make it appear translucent ghosts are integrated into the sets and its very well done.  Not a must see but maybe light enough to watch before bed. 

Silent Summer: Dans la nuit (1929) direccted by Charles Vanel

 

One of, if the last of the French silent film era. this film is a tour de force in acting and image composition. The editing and transitions are amazing and the recent restoration really lays to rest any ideas that silent films were primitive filmmaking in any way. 

After a disfiguring mining accident, a man hides his face from his wife who he discovered is charting on him. He catches her and her lover who is also wearing a mask and in the struggle, the husband is killed and the body dumped in the river. I won't spoil things but suffice it to say that murder leads to to a number of twists and turns that use creative montage to show the [present, what really happened and to move between the past and present in a truly masterful way. The only problem I have is with the ending, which was forced on the director by the studio. It still works but could have been a much more powerful ending if the studio had kept their hands off it. 

I saw this on French TV and I have no idea where else it can be seen. I did not find it on Amazon or on YouTube but if you get a chance see it! 

Les deux orphelines vampires (1997) directed by Jean Rollin.

 

Once again we found ourselves watching another Jean Rollin film. To my credit, it was a double feature and I stopped the second film early on. This was only slightly better than "Requiem for a Vampire" and only slightly less confusing. The premise is pretty interesting, however. Two blind orphans live with nuns in... Paris? ...New York? ... but can see at night with everything having a blue tint, except when they forget to add it or the budget doesn't allow it. They are also somehow vampires. I liked the idea of being blind in the daytime and sighted at night and 2 vampires hiding their secret by living in an orphanage run by nuns was intriguing. Sadly, the plot is a mess and makes little sense. The orphanage is clearly in Paris but the girls run around New York, I guess it's a flashback but it, like most things in this movie is not made all that clear. The two run into other supernatural creatures, or not, they might just be crazy people. One seems ot be another sort of vampire who lives in Père Lachaise Cemetery has massive bat wings in place of arms and wears a tight disco outfit not seen since Studio 54 was open. 

Like his other films, it drags on and characters wax poetic about their fate. The vampire children are pretty reckless and tell anyone who will listen they are vampires it seems. After being adopted they get drunk and one is shot by their adopted parent who thinks there is an invader on his property. They run away and the the one gets shot and they drown each other in a river. 

A positive for this film over his others is in this one the underage girls are not naked and having sex all the time though they are sexualized. Their blindness is sometimes forgotten and time is pretty fluid. The visit Père Lachaise Cemetery, fall asleep, wake up hours later yet somehow the 2 other couples they passed early in the day are still there. 

Rollin is known for these vampire films although he has made plenty of others types of movies but I am not sure why he has a following. I guess we have seen three so far so I shouldn't criticize! 

L’Année Dernière à Marienbad (1961) directed byAlain Renais

This is a staple of the French New Wave and for good reason. The cinematography is beyond amazing. The camera moves precisely with tracking shots I would not have thought possible at this time period and lighting and composition is fantastic. Delphine Seyrig and Giorgio Albertazzi are beautiful, cold and impeccably dressed. 

One thing you should not expect from this film is answers to what is going on  or even who the characters are. No one is named, we don’t know exactly where, or even when they are  or what is happening or merely in the head of the characters. A man and woman meet at fancy hotel and agree to meet again a year later. A year later, they are both there but the woman says she doesn’t remember the man and is with a guy who “ might be her husband… or not”. Dialog is repeated, time is fluid, the actors start in one location and time and are suddenly continuing the dialog in another location and time. There is amazing editing and the man or woman might be killed by the maybe husband… or it’s all in someone’s head. There really isn’t much of a resolution and it doesn’t really matter. It’s beautiful to see. 

L'aigle à deux têtes (1948) directed by Jean Cocteau

This film was based on the play, also written by jean Cocteau and was based very loosely on the deaths of Ludwig the second of Bavaria and Empress Elisabeth of Austria.

Spoilers:

A queen whose king has died has kept her faced veiled in public for a decade life is changed and given a rather morbid direction when an anarchistic poet enters her chamber with the intention to kill her. She falls immediately in love with him, mostly because he a dead ringer for her dead husband but also because he is played by Jean Marias- Who wouldn't fall in love him?

Political intrigue ensues but there is a fatality about their love they can't escape. The queen states quite plainly they will be each other's demise at the start. She embraces this idea more than we think as, at the end, she angers the poet enough to stab her while he has taken poison to save her from political ruin. She thanks him for the knife in the back as she dies.

While not as sumptuous in style as Cocteau's more well know films, this film looks beautiful, not in small part because of the beauty of its stars - Edwidge Feuilliére and Jean Marias. Both are fantastic in  their roles and the cinematography shows off the countryside and castle sets in the best light possible. The story moves along a decent pace, taking time to build the characters that are both iconic and real feeling at the time.

A nice rare behind the scenes shot.

L'illusionniste (2010)

L'illusionniste (2010) 80 min  

Director Sylvain Chomet and the team that made «Triplets of Bellville» have made a new animated film that is truly amazing to see. The characters studies are wonderfully subtle and look and colours are amazing. Like «Belville» this Belgian film really is beyond language. Most of the dialog is unintelligible and while you might catch a french or english word here or there... it isn’t really important as the entire story is told visually. Only a note at the very end of the film is important in terms of story.. very important, though reading it on the note or in a subtitle wont take away from the experience.

The only flaw in this film is one clip that is a little too computer generated and it passes quickly. Like most hand drawn animations, physical items like cars or other solid objects are occasionally rendered with CGI but match really well with the detailed characters and painted back drops.

The story is a bitter sweet one, following the degrading career of a magician forced to go into smaller and smaller venues as the call for his sort of entertainment dwindles with the public tastes. A young girl at a Scottish pub where he is performing thinks he is really magic (this takes place before the second world war) and she decides to follow him on his travels. he reluctantly allows her and while he tries to tell her he really isn’t magic, he nevertheless tries to realize her dreams, even if it means making his life more difficult than it already is.

In many ways this is a film by animators for animators but it’s sweetness and ambiguous storyline should appeal to anyone.

Les Amants Criminels Dir: François Ozon 1999

Alice convinces her impotent boyfriend Luc to kill a classmate after telling him the classmate and 4 of his friends raped her and took photos. Luc seems somewhat attracted to boy he is to help kill but his weak personality is no match for the controlling Alice. She sets up a very sexual trap and Luc violently stabs the naked, innocent young man while she giddily laughs and watches. After the vicious murder, they rob a jewelry store, hide the body in the woods and... well, then it gets weird.

As it turns out, they have lost their way in the woods and come across a cabin where the mute troll-like wooodsman who owns it, traps them in a basement. Suddenly, we are watching “Hansel and Gretel”. The film becomes a perverse version of the well known fairy-tale. The woodsman takes a liking to Luc whom he sodomizes, but otherwise treats him like a preferred pet and leaves Alice to starve in the basement. The woodsman also discovers the murder victim and throws the corpse in the cellar to rot with her. His actions are so horrible that at this point you easily forget what these two have done not so long before. They are so cute, small and innocent looking, you almost can believe they are simply harmless victims... at least compared to their captor.

They do escape and en route away from the cabin of horror, make love in the woods while animals watch in a heavily Disney referenced scene... making it, to say the least, somewhat disturbing and uncomfortably humorous.

This film, despite it’s gruesome subject matter, is beautiful. Much better than Ozon’s first film “Sitcom” and maybe better than his films that followed in many ways. This is one film you can not easily peg down in any sort of category and leaves you unsure what you think, not just about the film, but many other things long after it’s over

Everything Sounds Better in French

... like "Starsky and Hutch."

Roller Girl

Harry - He's Here to Help

With a Friend Like Harry or/ou Harry, un ami qui vous veut du bien

Last night's DVR from IFC. The feel of this film by director Dominik Moll is akin to Hitchcock, yet without any direct "tribute-y" vibe. I mean it's well-constructed; the structure of the shot sequence is so carefully thought out that the journey this film takes you on unfolds with every moment seeming to emanate from a blank slate. It's only until the final 3rd of the film that one starts to anticipate some of the shocking activities that take place. The players are all radiating their own enigmatic energy, even when no dialogue carries them. Lastly, the bathroom is about one of the best non-human actors I've seen in a while. Strongly, STRONGLY recommended by me. I know, "So what?" So there.

You will at least temporarily feel like you want to avoid having guests

Sry - no subtitled trailer.

Jésus of Montréal

Released one year after “The Last Temptation of Christ” you’d think there was a christian revival going on at the time. This is no historical drama, but follows the life of an actor hired to play Christ in a passion play here in Montréal. The story basically follows pretty closely what you get in the biblical version, cleverly updating the situations with modern equivalents. The whole cast becomes entangled in a Catholic controversy as their play becomes a huge success despite or rather because of it’s unconventional look at the story. Their personal lives also begin to follow the story right until the bitter end when Daniel (the actor playing Jésus) dies and even has a resurrection of sorts. Lothaire Bluteau is great as the actor/christ/actor and the direction by Denys Arcand is spot on throughout.

This film made huge waves in the cinema world at the time and put Arcand on the map as a great Québec film maker. Several of his other films made waves as well, including “The Decline of the American Empire” (which I thought was pretty run of the mill) and it’s sequel made 17 years later with the same cast (which might be his best film ever).

Oddly, though released internationally, the DVD versions of this film were only in French until recently. This made it very hard to recommend to cinephiles who spoke any other language.

Amélie - my current/ongoing obsession

"Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain" is a film that after reading a brief synopsis, I would have avoided like
the plague. It screams “chick flick” . Jean-Pierre Jeunet, however is no “Beaches” imitator. His previous films such as “La Cité des enfants perdus”, “Delicatessen” and the tragically forgettable “Alien: Resurrection” (you can’t blame him for trying to make some money I suppose) made it impossible not to go out and see it.

The lead (the brilllant Audrey Tautou) has what in any other film would be portrayed as a very sad existence. (Her over protective and cold parents, the death of her mother, friendless childhood and her inability to relate to anyone or even form friendships other than a pleasant rapport with co-workers as a young adult). Under Juenet, this subject matter is transformed in to the sweetest, funniest film about 2 misfits, happlily living in their own solitary worlds of simple pleasures finding each other.

Sweet as Amélie seems, she certainly has a mean streak or at the very least, heightened sense of how social injustices should be punished. Nothing is simple for her. When she sees the boy of her dreams (Mathieu Kassovitz)... she can’t just ask him to take a coffee... she has to create the most elaborate scheme ever devised to meet him and at the same time, keep her distance. Being just as maladjusted as she is, he rises to the occasion and she realizes her goal, despite herself. I n some ways, it’s a throw back to those Astaire/Rogers romances in those absurd, yet somehow relateable stories.It gives hope to every social misfit, that being yourself eventaully can pay off in finding someone compatible and equally odd without compromising your soul, or even having the enter “the real world”, where ever that is.

For a film I would never had seen in normal conditions, I find that I can’t even look at the DVD without putting it in and watching the whole thing over again... and again. Am I so wrong to love this film so much?

His next film, “Un long dimanche de finançialles” with the same actress was equally good in some ways. Much more bitter sweet and with a scene so shocking in violence, yet so perfect to convey exactly how someone can completely lose their mind in the horrors of war, it was almost the “anti-Amélie” as a polio stricken women searches for her love lost in the war and actually succeeds but not in the way she had hoped. It leaves you to decide if she really even found him or just what was left of him.

Alain Bashung est mort de cancer

Alain Bashung est mort
Actor. Musician and singer Alain Bashung has died of lung cancer at the age of 61. Starting out as lounge singer mostly in American venues he eventually made a name for himself in music. His CD « Fantasie Militaire » is one of my favoutite albums. It's wonderfully dark and moody with ambiguous lyrics... what could be better?
His acting career begain in 1981 in the film « Ma soeur chinoise » by Alain Mazars.
He often played here in Montréal, even giving a free concert at Les Francofolies one year.

Satan bouche un coin

It's a trimmed down version of Jean-Pierre Bouyxou's "Satan bouche un coin", set to Morticia's Theme, of course.

You can see the devilish thing in it's entirety here.

Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo? (again)

Les Yeux Sans Visage

The music gets me in the mood every time!
I love everything about this movie but I still haven't got the soundtrack yet. More actual clips coming soon.

Les Filles C'est Fait

(music by Charlotte Leslie)

Video footage from 'L'amante del Vampiro'.Now that I've been banned from YouTube I've got to put my videos somewhere. And to think, it wasn't because of filth!

The LASH Picture Show

When it's not boring me to tears with earnest films about saving the planet and other such trivial hoo-ha, the SUNDANCE Channel actually presents something that gets me all excited. Let's see, I think the IMDb sums it up best:


Absurdism
Fashion
Surreal
Satire
France
Nudity

These are a few of my favorite things and they are all there in the fluffy mess of "WHO ARE YOU, POLLY MAGOO?" It is the celluloid version of a collage collaboration by BIBA (they're back, dahlings!) and Salvador Dali.


Actually, the filmmaker is WILLIAM KLEIN, who also had a little side job as a fashion photographer back in the day....
The "plot" revolves around super model, Polly, and a TV show attempting to do a profile of her...but is there any depth to a model? What is the meaning of fashion? Is Prince Charming a foot fetishist? Where can I find a Saarinen-inspired TV like the Prince has in his bedroom?This flick doesn't answer any of these questions, however any movie that incorporates Fashion, Fetishism, French philosophy and Fabulashes that would make Twiggy blink thrice has moi as a new fan!

As a delightful little side dish, here's Polly's Yankee Doodle Cracker commercial! Sadly, Dorothy MacGowan-an unknown at the time, disappeared soon after the film was done...unless she's Julianne Moore's doppelganger!





Apparently, there's a box set of Mr. Klein's better-known works available...and it's going straight onto my Amazon Wish List:

"William Klein s explosive, challenging New York street photography made him one of the most heralded artists of the fifties. An American expatriate in Paris, Klein has also been making challenging cinema for over forty years, yet, with the exception of his acclaimed 1969 documentary MUHAMMAD ALI, THE GREATEST, his film work is barely known in the United States. In his three fiction features WHO ARE YOU, POLLY MAGGOO?, MR. FREEDOM, and THE MODEL COUPLE he skewers the fashion industry, American imperialism, and middle-class complacency with hilarious, cutting aplomb. Today, Klein s politically galvanizing and insanely entertaining social critiques seem even more ahead of their time than works of the more famous New Wavers that overshadowed them: colorful, surreal antidotes to all .."

Anything that has Donald Pleasence as "Dr. Freedom" and Serge Gainsbourg as "M. Drugstore" has got to be worth viewing! Oh, and now I'm sold...what a glorious montage of 1960s excess:

Mmmmmm......I can just taste a delicious double scoop in the art house of my mind: "PUTNEY SWOPE" and "MR. FREEDOM"!