Tag: Juliet Berto

by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: Le Sex Shop

Written by Richard T. Jameson March 30, 2016

[Originally published in Movietone News 33, July 1974]

It must be a mark of our starving hunger for foreign films that Le Sex Shop has garnered such generous notices. Certainly this unassuming mixture of marital comedy and social satire deserves the benefit of the doubt, at least when shown in the dubbed version exhibited locally: the soundtrack seems full of dead air even when people are speaking, and of course there’s just no way for the unique intonations of a Jean-Paul Marielle to survive transliteration, let alone transvocalization. Marielle’s balding, swinging dentist is the best thing about the movie but, dubbed, he’s only about half a good thing. He’s one of a number of sexual eccentrics who cross the path of a petit bourgeois—played by the director himself in a role apparently carrying over from Marry Me, Marry Me—after he converts his unsuccessful bookshop into a thriving porn parlor. The nebbish soon gets caught up in the pursuit of erotic satiety, only about half against his will, and by film’s end he can get off only by having his wife describe a lascivious encounter with the dentist that never happened and that, just maybe, he knows never happened.

Blu-ray / DVD: Jacques Rivette’s nouvelle vague magnum opus ‘Out 1’ restored and reclaimed

Written by Sean Axmaker January 13, 2016

Jacques Rivette’s Out 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.

by Ken Eisler, Contributors, Film Reviews

Doppler Effect at the Dunbar

Written by Movietone News contributor October 18, 2014

[Originally published in Movietone News 43, September 1975]

by Ken Eisler

In the city of Vancouver, a foreign-film addict enjoys two major connections, the Pacific Cinémathèque (downtown) and the University of British Columbia’s Cinema 16 series (on campus). Both sources dry up during the summer, but fortunately in mid-July along comes Don Barnes’ annual International Film Festival to stave off withdrawal symptoms.

The festival was held this year at the Dunbar Theatre with two-a-night features ranging from amusing pap like Berri’s Le Sex Shop to “political” cinema from Italy such as Lulu the Tool and Love and Anarchy. Political themes were more heavily represented than usual this summer, in fact, with Hearts and Minds treating U.S. involvement in Vietnam and two French-Canadian features set in the troubled province of Quebec.

I didn’t see Bingo, a fiction film about a group of young terrorists, but Michel Brault’s sober, powerful Les Ordres is one of three festival films I wouldn’t mind looking at again if they return for a regular run during the year.

by Rick Hermann, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: ‘Middle of the World’

Written by Rick Hermann September 16, 2014

[Originally published in Movietone News 44, September 1975]

A thin mist covers an eerily silent, seemingly uninhabited countryside; a car carrying two men seeps into view and, without warning, tumbles off the road and into a field. We suddenly realize that we have viewed what is perhaps death (we never do find out what happens to the men) with what amounts to a stylistic shrug of the shoulders. We hear one or two muffled bumps, the car finally comes to rest, and that’s it: no preparation, no comment, just the bare incident itself seen as though dissociated from any point of view that seems reasonably human. I’m not sure I can say just why I find that scene—which happens about three-quarters of the way through Alain Tanner’s fourth feature film—so effectively chilling. Whatever it is about it seems to spring from unanalyzable sources concealed beneath some mysterious veil of tonal incongruity, and yet the intimations of detachment one receives may find support in a more solid stylistic articulation that serves to integrate Tanner’s themes of communication and perception with a soft-spoken visual approach that is deceptively arbitrary and surprisingly precise.

by Peter Hogue, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: Céline and Julie Go Boating

Written by Peter Hogue July 27, 2010

[Originally published in Movietone News 58-59, August 1978]

Céline and Julie Go Boating just may bring Jacques Rivette from the background to the foreground in the continuing history of French New Wave directors. Rivette is another of the Cahiers du cinéma writers who made his way from critic to director but, at least until now, has remained something of an unknown quantity, more mentioned than seen. Commercial and legal difficulties with his first two films (Paris Belongs to Us, 1958-60, and The Nun, 1962) meant that his movies were discussed by European observers long before they were shown (and then only briefly) in this country. His films since then have been extraordinarily long (Spectre runs 13 hours; Out One, a much shorter assemblage from the same footage, still runs four hours) and that may have a lot to do with the apparent lack of circulation accorded L’Amour fou, a four-hour Rivette which has had a U.S. distributor for some time but scant bookings.