[Originally written for Queen Anne/Magnolia News, 2004]
There is a moment in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution when the protagonist, the scion of an Italian noble family, learns that a friend has taken his own life. He had been speaking with the young man only hours before and declined his fervent proposal that they go again to see Howard Hawks’s RedRiver. Bertolucci cranes up and backs off from his hero; then his camera pivots on the young man’s figure, slowly describing 90 degrees of arc around him as he looks out at a changed world.
[Originally published in Movietone News 30, March 1974]
Truffaut’s Day for Night is a delight. It’s a film about some people making a film, with Truffaut himself playing the film-within-a-film’s director, but there’s only a little cinematic selfconsciousness in it. Above all, it is a very charming entertainment. Few, if any, of Truffaut’s films have had such a heady feeling of joy and pleasure all the way through. And few, if any, of the various films made about filmmakers and filmmaking have been so self-effacing. Jacqueline Bisset, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Jean-Pierre Aumont and Valentina Cortese play the actors in the film of one M. Ferrand (Truffaut) and each to some extent has been given a role (in Day forNight) which evokes his “real-life” image. But while Truffaut gives the Ferrand character three dream sequences in which a small boy—Ferrand and/or Truffaut as child?—steals some CitizenKane stills from a theater display, the film is not really Truffaut’s 8 1/2.
[Originally published in Movietone News 32, June 1974]
The Mother and the Whore is a sort of New Wave marathon, a three-and-a-half-hour return to the French cinema of the Sixties as well as to the generation of youth with which it was often concerned. Here that generation has reached the Seventies (and its own thirties) and is finding, once more, that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Jean-Pierre Léaud, that ever-evolving icon of the New Wave, is at the center of the action as an intelligent young Parisian making a career out of post-adolescence with long talks and occasional pickups in sidewalk cafés and other Left Bank environs. At the outset, Alexandre (Léaud) is living with, and apparently off, a boutique operator (Bernadette Lafont), while also making attempts at reconciliation with a previous lover (Isabel Weingarten). Soon, though, he begins a third and increasingly complex relationship with a Polish nurse (Françoise LeBrun) and eventually finds himself bedded down with both LeBrun and Lafont in the latter’s apartment. The three-way relationship undergoes a series of unresolved convulsions which focus increasing attention on Veronika (LeBrun), whose wearily selfconscious mixture of warm allure and abrupt despair perhaps make her both the mother and the whore of the title.
Jacques Rivette’sOut 1 (Kino Lorber / Carlotta, Blu-ray+DVD) has been one of the Holy Grails of international cinema since its premier screening in 1971. Rejected by French TV and, at over 12 1/2 hours in its initial cut, too long for theaters, the definitive editions wasn’t even completed until 1989. It showed on French and German TV but apart from periodic special screenings (including a handful of showings in the U.S. and Canada in 2006 and 2007) was impossible to see.
That changed in 2015 with a French digital restoration from the original 16mm negatives, a high-profile two-week run in New York (qualifying as the film’s American theatrical debut) followed by screenings across the country (including Seattle), streaming availability from the arthouse subscription service Fandor and a late 2015 disc release in France. Now 2016 brings this amazing Blu-ray+DVD combo box set release. It features not only the 13-hour Out 1: Noli me tangere (1971 / 1989) but the shorter Out 1: Spectre (1974), designed for a theatrical release after French TV balked at his original vision, plus an accompanying documentary and a booklet.
