Lost in Criterion

Our second episode on Olivier Assayas' Carlos (2010) finds the film in overdrive trying to strip away any ideological motivation from its main character and paint him as moving toward purely profit-driven, which is probably the worst thing a Marxist could be. While Disc 2's additional features have our first behind the scenes look with Assayas insisting that he is being true to reality as much as possible, there's already been a lot of speculation that seemingly serves to only depoliticize Carlos' actions. But at least the music is very, very good.

The only work we've seen from Olivier Assayas before is Summer Hours, part of the Criterion Collections sub-collection of getting 21st century cinema into their purview by releasing seemingly every non-US family drama produced in the first decade of the new millennium. Like all those films (Yi Yi, Secert Sunshine, etc) we enjoyed Summer Hours.

We return to Assayas in the Collection this week with a very different film, well the first of three, actually. Carlos (2010) is a sort of biopic (though with plenty of editorializing, supposition, and fictionalization) of the life of freedom fighter or terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, popularly known as Carlos the Jackal. The work is a 3-part miniseries of feature length tv films, and we'll be tackling each in its own episode, sprinkling in Criterion's ample supplements, in order to give the total 339 minute runtime of Carlos its proper due.

This week we see Carlos as a fledgling freedom fighter, aligning with the Popular Front for Palestinian Liberation and deciding that means blowing stuff up in France. Episode one (and this week's supplements) lay the foundation for what I hope does not prove to be the main thesis of the film: that Carlos is a hypocritical womanizer ultimately more interested in bourgeois comforts than in Palestinian liberation. We also cover disc 4 of the set, which contains what seems to be a good chunk of Assayas's sources: two tv documentaries on Carlos and an interview with then-on-the-run former Carlos associate Hans-Joachim Klein.

Our second Claude Chabrol film is his second film, Les Cousins (1959) which came out a month before Truffaut's The 400 Blows and as a piece of "French New Wave" meets almost none of the criteria we've come to associate with the movement. It's visually nice at times, but we just don't care about any of these characters or their conflicts.

Claude Chabrol's Le Beau Serge (1958) is, by some definitions, the first film of the French New Wave. I feel like I've said that before. Chabrol clearly has a preternatural eye for the visual language of film. If only he had a similar talent for writing. Le Beau Serge is beautiful, but it's bland.

We kick off 2024 with a New Year's Eve carol. Victor Sjöström's The Phantom Carriage (1921) exists in the same genre as A Christmas Carol or It's a Wonderful Life, but unfortunately its only social message is one of temperance from alcohol. But what The Phantom Carriage lacks in intriguing plot it more than makes up for in innovative special effects, with its ghostly characters fully inhabiting a three dimensional world. With the technical limitations of cameras at the time, this movie is all the more amazing. No wonder Bergman loved it so much.

We finish up the Complete Jean Vigo boxset and the year 2023 this week, covering Vigo's final film L'Atalante. Vigo pressed himself for his first feature length, and perhaps too hard, dying of complications of tuberculosis before the premier. The studio took the opportunity of his demise to re-cut the movie, add different music, and try desperately to make it a pop culture smash in an era where France was obsessed with stories of barges. Despite the studio's efforts, a slightly restored L'Atalante and the other works of Vigo went on to be a major influence on the French New Wave, namely Truffaut who speaks with Eric Rohmer about L'Atalante in one of this boxset's special features.

We've all been there, the trepidation of introducing a new partner to your family. And why do we always seem to do it at the holidays? Maybe we're hoping that all the tinsel and the trash will distract the family just enough to make them welcoming. The family in Blood Beat (1983) has your normal family problems when new girlfriend Sarah arrives, and things get worse immediately as mom's psychic abilities put Sarah on edge and celebrations take a backseat to a ghost samurai murdering the neighbors.

This winter we're gathering together on the longest night of the year, well in the northern hemisphere at least, and watching a holiday horror film. Well, holiday enough. Like each of our holiday specials, the end of year holidays are rather incidental to the plot of Blood Beat. Our dear friend Stephen G. joins us for a film he was, inexplicably enough, already planning to watch this year for the first time.

As any review of Blood Beat will tell you, it's a deeply weird film, but it's maybe not even the weirdest movie we've seen this year? I mean, we watched House and Head and Crumb this year. Truly, from Antichrist to Zazie dans le Metro, the tenth year of Lost in Criterion brought us some brilliant films that are more than a bit out of the ordinary. Blood Beat isn't actually too far off from some movies we've seen this year, and even closer to some of the lower budget independently produced horror films we've seen as part of the collection in the past. Maybe we'll get a Criterion release of it before we're done.

This week we're covering the first part of Criterion's The Complete Jean Vigo set. There's just enough material in this set that we felt like we should do two episodes on it to give Jean Vigo his due. And what due this director deserves! Before dying of complication of tuberculosis at the age of 29 in 1934, Vigo produced only four works but they are each innovative and influential.

This week we cover his first three works: a newsreel/travelogue look at class distinctions in a port town in À propos de Nice (1930), a "Tokyo Olympiad" style look at a swimming star in Taris (1931), and a narrative about schoolboy revolution in Zéro de conduite (1933). And it's a good thing we decided to split this up because just covering these three shorter works led to a nearly 2 hour episode.

Next week is our annual holiday special, so we'll finish up the Jean Vigo set with L'Atalante (1934) in two weeks.

8 years ago this week our episode on Roman Polanski's Knife in the Water posted and we had a discussion about the director's misogyny. Two years ago this month, we talked about Roman Polanski's Repulsion and had a discussion about the director's misogyny. Now our third of his movies, Cul-de-sac (1966), offers us a chance to armchair psychoanalyze the man once again, as it becomes clear that his misogyny stems from his understanding all human relationships as power-struggles that someone must win.

It is the most interesting to us Polanski movie we've seen so far, certainly, resting mostly on the atmosphere of it's setting and the fact that this crime thriller maybe started life as a backdoor adaptation of Waiting for Godot.

But also, what malevolent coincidence have we encountered that we talk about Polanski films during the holidays.

Lee Chang-dong's story of incredible loss and grief, of where community can be found and where it cannot, Secret Sunshine (2007) shows the failings of a religion designed to solve status quo middle class problems under capitalism, but reminds us that there is still hope. Hirokazu Kore-eda (director of Spine 554: Still Walking) called this the best film of the 21st century so far, and he may be right, but while Secret Sunshine is a must see, it's hard to imagine having the emotional fortitude to watch it twice.