I always get a kick out of watching characters eat in movies; it’s a little pleasure of mine to observe them actually behave like human beings: talking over one another, fidgeting with their hands, having to write something down because they won’t remember it later, and, you know, locking doors since everyone always seems to barge into houses and cars without any bit of a struggle. When a movie like Éric Rohmer’s My Night at Maud’s comes along, it takes it one step further. Here we have characters that actually think; and I don’t mean iterate lines that will move the plot along, but people that sit down and talk. They talk about love, they talk about religion, they talk about sex—anything that comes to mind. One leaves for the night, another is asked to spend it at the hostess’s house because it’s far too late and dangerous to drive home—stuff that could actually happen in the real world. And when the story grows from here, something exciting occurs: you’re immersed in the characters’ ideologies, beliefs, fears, and not solely on their actions. That becomes the driving force of the movie: them, their discourse, the stuff that you connect with people in the real world about. It’s quite the experience watching. Something that I could definitely go on and on about like any of Rohmer’s characters, so I better stop here. As for the rest of the year, art house movies galore.
1. My Night at Maud’s (Éric Rohmer)
2. The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah)
3. Army of Shadows (Jean-Pierre Melville)
4. La Femme infidèle (Claude Chabrol)
5. Kes (Ken Loach)
6. Z (Costa-Gavras)
7. La Piscine (Jacques Deray)
8. Women in Love (Ken Russell)
9. They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (Sidney Pollack)
10. Mississippi Mermaid (Francois Truffaut)
I have to hand it to a lot of French stuff that won me over titles like Midnight Cowboy and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—American classics, nevertheless. But it’s hard to look past Melville’s maneuvering WWII drama or the erotic thriller gratification of Chabrol’s La Femme infidèle. Then there’s Ken Loach’s Kes, which I watched for the first time on a double bill with his TV play, Cathy Come Home, and revealed, at least to me, that Loach gets his social message across strongest through raw performances that are nothing short of spiritual. Jacques Deray had the sun-baked and, pardon my français, mindfuck, La Piscine, while Sydney Pollack’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? taps the emotional well most unsparingly dry. Wrap it up with Z and Women in Love, which made international stars of their directors, and Mississippi Mermaid, a misfire by Truffaut that grows absorbingly unpredictable when it loses its story (edging out Fellini Satyricon and Bergman’s The Passion of Anna), and… that’s 1969 for you!
Next time, 1995. I promise.
Waterfront Cinema 