Does One Go to Jail for Existentialism?

The classic French film Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut (English title mistranslated as: A Man Escaped or The Wind Bloweth Where It Listeth) is the very definition of slow burrn.

Essentially, there’s this guy who is condemned to death by the Germans in a prison in Nazi-controlled France. His crime: resistance activities such as sabotage.

He calmly accepts all of this and quietly decides to escape.

He does so, eventually.

It’s a film in which nothing happens violently or rapidly. He decides how to do it. He speaks to other inmates. He hears someone being machine gunned by a firing squad. All of it happens softly, the lack of volume enforced by German guards admonishing the prisoners to stop talking. Even the sentence of death, once formalized isn’t carried out in any hurry, which allows our hero to continue planning his escape.

It’s like reading Camus… but in film form.

The tension–and this is a tense film–comes from the audience. We know the man is in a dangerous German prison. We know time is running out, and at any moment a firing squad is going to turn our hero into Swiss cheese.

But the prisoner goes about his life slowly, as if the Sword of Damocles hanging over him is a mere detail that he can afford to ignore.

In this sense, the film is utterly masterful, and well deserving of its position on the list.

Recommended.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose own attempts at describing the everyday world via literature are probably best represented by his collection of linked short stories Love and Death. You can check it out here.

Lola Montez – An Aesthetically Artsy Film From the Fifties

The fifties as a film era were notable for a lot of stuff, including the rise of science fiction as a major film genre, the Golden Age of Japanese film and Singin’ in the Rain. But Lola Montès did something I only recall seeing once–in The Red Shoes–recently: it went for a visually artsy look to frame the story.

The plot of the film isn’t noteworthy in any way except for the fact that it details the (short) life of an incredible woman. What was interesting on the other hand, are the circus scenes used as a framing device.

It was a good choice since the lush atmosphere of the circus is not only visually appealing, but also seems to mirror, in a dingy, lower-class way, the theater of court life. It works quite well, and though a bit boring and predictable, the film is gorgeous. It’s the kind of movie that the rich color of the era begged filmmakers to produce.

So the film is split between the biographical scenes of a scandalous life which were pedestrian at best, and the circus scenes which made this movie a lock for the 1001 Films list. Of the actual story elements, I loved seeing Mad King Ludwig’s lesser-known dad shown to be a bit of a waffle as well. But you’ll watch this one as an experiment in beauty more than as a narrative film. As such, it does succeed.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose latest book of literary fiction is a novel composed of short stories entitled Safe and Sorry. You can check it out here.

An Early Attempt at a Chilling Topic

No matter how many documentaries one watches about the Holocaust, it’s impossible to become inured to the subject. Or at least it is in my case.

So it’s no surprise that Alain Resnais’ short documentary Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog) made such an impact in 1956 that it was included in the 1001 Films list a half-century later. This one pulls no punches except for a single artistic decision made by the filmmaker to emphasize that the events were not a purely German phenomenon: none of the scenes are filmed in Germany. The deportation scenes are from France, while the concentration camps depicted are in Poland.

If 2022 audiences are shocked by the brutality despite having seen the images before, people in 1956, some of whom were viewing the content in cohesive story form–outside of newsreels–for the first time, must have been overwhelmed. It’s a skillfully built film created from probably the most powerful imagery of the 20th century. Even more to the point, it spoke of wounds that were still very early in the healing process.

One example of this, outside of the obvious question of countless families torn apart and lives ruined, is how the French censors of the time responded to the film. As I mentioned, the deportation scenes were shot in France. Some of the images showed Vichy (French) officials in the scenes. The filmmaker was threatened to have the film itself banned (on other grounds) if those uniformed officials were not removed from the edit. He had no choice but to accept.

Regardless of what war movies might have been made afterwards, this film brings the story of WWII to a close. While there are other films on the 1001 movies list that show events in and around the war (whether documentary or fiction), and there are excellent documentaries about the actual fighting, my opinion is that there are only two films about WWII that everyone should watch in order to understand the war. Night and Fog is the second of those films; the first is the chilling Triumph des Willens. Watch them in that order, and your mind will easily be able to understand how the war, and its consequences came to be.

Neither was created during the war, and neither deals with the fighting. But they make you understand.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose latest novel is a science fiction adventure entitled Colony in which a human settlement is created on a planet whose unseen previous inhabitants see humans as little more than playthings. You can check it out here.

In Bob Le Flambeur, Montmartre is the Main Character

When i think of 1950s nostalgia, I think of drive-in restaurants, waitresses on roller skates, neon, chrome and tailfins. But Bob Le Flambeur is a wonderful evocation of another lost era: the 1950s in Montmartre. Now this region of Paris has been a place for people of different classes to get together at least since the time of the impressionists, but what makes its appearance in this film amazing is how it combines the modern look of the bars (along with a huge number of dudes on either xylophones or glockenspiels) with the older look and feel of both the buildings around them and the plot of the movie.

The plot is kind of a 1930s noir / gangster flick / heist movie (and no one will be able to convince me that it didn’t inspire Ocean’s Eleven) with a plot that isn’t original — the one I think of is The Asphalt Jungle. But it’s so much better than that one.

Bob is a retired criminal and now a gambler who is still well-respected and well-connected in the underworld, played in an understated way by Roger Duchesne. He has a young sidekick, of course, and a crew straight out of central casting.

Except the girl. This girl makes the bombshells of the noir era look unsophisticated and boring. There’s just something about Isabelle Corey in this one that makes her one of the most alluring and dangerous female leads I can remember seeing. And though she’s pretty, this comes mostly from how she plays the role, without, seemingly, a care in the world.

This is a good film all around.

But it’s that walk along a Montmartre poised between the old world and the modern which really elevated it into the realm of greatness, and the reason I just immersed myself in it without a care in the world. Highly recommended.

Gustavo Bondoni is an Argentine novelist and short story writer whose latest book is a comic novel of Heroic-era Greece called The Malakiad. You can check it out here.

A Shocking Film Likely Even More Shocking to Modern Audiences

Watching the 1001 films list is always cool. Sometimes because the films are really good. Other times because they’re classics you really, really need to be familiar with. But probably the best of all are the short experimental films. No others have the same WTF factor.

Les Maitres Fous (The Mad Masters) from 1955 may be the most WTF of all. It shows the goings on of an anti-colonialist sect in Ghana (still two years away from independence when the film was shot), complete with dog-eating, trances and dancing.

Is it a documentary? It is presented as such, but seems just far enough off-kilter to create serious doubts. The feeling is more like a modern “reality” show which is scripted to seem real.

Either way, it’s a bit of a disgusting film, in the purely visceral sense (I don’t get disgusted by unfortunate portrayals of people in old films – people who do so are too dumb to understand context). Blood and foaming mouths are not all that fun to watch.

But at the same time, it’s a film you can’t look away from. In that sense, it’s the cinematic equivalent of a bad road accident.

Interestingly, this one has offended both colonial officials (the butt of the supposed joke in the film) in its own day, and people who are outraged by the colonial era today. So it’s the gift that keeps on giving.

My own opinion? I didn’t like it. It feels like the objective was just to shock… without much underlying merit either from the anthropological side (unless it’s actually unscripted, which I find hard to believe) or from the artistic.

But don’t take my word for it. You can watch the film on YouTube, and draw your own conclusions. Since it’s quite short, at the very least you will find it interesting.

Gustavo Bondoni’s latest book is entitled Desert Base Strike. If monsters and modern battlefields, with non-stop action thrown in for good measure sounds like something you’d enjoy, then you can check it out here.

The Film that knocked Hitchcock Off His Perch

If you ask anyone who is the master of suspense, you’ll likely get the same answer from most people: Alfred Hitchcock. Most people know that.

What most people don’t know, is that, for a few years in the 1950s, he was taken off that pedestal by a French director who is mostly forgotten today: Henri-Georges Clouzot, a man whose work we’ve already admired here, but who achieved international recognition with Les Diaboliques.

This is one of the best thrillers I’ve seen in a long time, particularly because it’s unpredictable until a few minutes from the end. It doesn’t torture you with the knowledge that bad things are coming in a precisely organized procession. After a while, you know the bad stuff is on its way, but you’d be hard-pressed to guess what form it takes.

And the end is greatly satisfying.

The only weak link here is the main actress, Clouzot’s wife Vera, who was not great, but the film is so strong it really didn’t matter all that much. The awkwardness in her acting actually fits into the personality of the character and you wonder if she was bad on purpose (apparently she wasn’t, but I only learned that when doing a bit of reading for this piece).

For those of you who read and enjoy my car stuff here, it’s fun to note that the characters crisscross France in an eminently unsuitable Citroen 2CV van.

I give this one a solid “recommended”. Hitchcock was only re-crowned with Psycho… and Clouzot has been mostly forgotten, at least by non-students of the seventh art outside of France.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novlist and short story writer whose own thriller is more of an action-driven exponent of the genre as opposed to an ambience-driven one. It’s called Timeless, and you can check it out here.

Ever Wonder Where Mr. Bean Came From? Here’s a Clue

We’re not strangers to weird French films here at CE. After all, there are french films on the 1001 Movies list, and French films are weird, so it’s a self fulfilling prophecy. But perhaps that over-simplification doesn’t take into account the reason we love the list so much. The selected French films might be weird, but each is weird in its own special way.

So they are delightful and unexpected, which makes ever the art films eminently watchable.

A case in point is today’s subject. Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (released in English as Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday) caught me completely off guard.

The version I watched was in Italian and, while I can read Italian with few problems, catching dialogue is a different matter altogether.

Turns out it didn’t matter. The dialogue in this one is very limited, easily understandable and works as background music for spots where silence would be obtrusive.

You see, this is a silent film in all but actual silence. It has sound, but the sound is pure background. What this film does is serve as a bridge between the silent bumbling-but-well-meaning characters of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd and the bumbling but well meaning Mr. Bean.

Hulot is precisely that kind of character, walking cluelessly through life without realizing what is about to befall him or understanding how his actions affect others while, at the same time transmitting that he is a nice guy.

Unlike the older films, there is no plot to this one. Hulot just goes about his holiday business in his inimitably clumsy way while others are annoyed or delighted by his presence. In tiny vignettes, the film criticizes the emerging french middle class… but little of the social satire reaches the modern audience except in the general sense of having stereotypes being mocked, which is always fun. In an era where Hollywood has gotten excessively political (and is deservedly losing its viewership), it’s nice to be able to watch a comedy without having to worry about the social message it attempts to transmit. Seventy years, apparently, is long enough for the boredom of political thought to fade and the enjoyment of comedy to remain.

This one is good. In fact, it’s easier to watch that the old silent films, even though the humor is much less over the top. The timing is moderns, the length of the elements is just long enough to be funny, but not excruciating or embarrassingly overdone (Mr Bean has a lot of that, unfortunately). Getting the balance of the humor just right in this kind of film is extremely difficult, and the perfect balance shifts with each viewer.

For my taste, this one got it exactly right, and has become my favorite Bumbling Character silent film. Even though it has sound in it.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose book Love and Death is a series of linked stories about real people in real situations… but only in those situations which truly mark a life. By avoiding the boring bits, he shows the characters as they truly are when the chips are down. You can check it out here.

The Wages of Suspense

I had no idea what 1953’s Le salaire de la peur (The Wages of Fear) was about before I watched it, and my utter sense of not knowing what the hell was going on grew even deeper when the first scenes showed a group of polyglot expat Europeans in a dusty Latin American village (most sources say South American, but I’ll admit it seemed much more Central American to me). The village, like the men themselves is a dead-end thing, a place for losers with nowhere left to go.

The plot is as thin as paper: two teams need to drive a pair of trucks filled with nitroglycerine–that explodes if it takes any shock–over 600km of rough mountain roads for an enormous payday. That’s it.

So why is it a classic and a critical darling? Because within that paper-thin structure, live two solid hours of suspense and character-building (which, considering the film’s denouement, verges on the nihilistic). There’s not a lot to tell. Even if I summarized the film without missing any of the important events therein, you won’t be able to get the sense that it transmits to audience. One critic said, in his day, that he had the feeling the entire theater was about to explode.

My wife likened the sensation to that of The Big Carnival, in that the story itself is both extremely simple and also secondary to the message the director wished to convey. And the thread used to connect the dots in each is the audience’s concern for the plight of certain cast members who are in mortal danger.

And as a comment on the weirdness of the film, Yves Montand, the older driver from Grand Prix also, interestingly, plays one of the drivers in this one. Fun stuff.

It’s not a film I’d watch a dozen times, but it’s definitely one that is worth watching once for the brilliant management of the tension within. If you can, get a copy and enjoy it.

Gustavo Bondoni is an Argentine novelist and short story writer whose thriller Timeless is a sexy and modern take on the international thriller. You can check it out here.

Madame de… is one of the Weirder Films on the list

The 1001 movies list contains films of all kinds. Romances and westerns, comedies and horror. It’s even got some core science fiction on it.

Madame de… (translated into English as The Earrings of Madame de...) defies easy classification. If you go by the plot, it’s obviously a melodrama, especially considering the ending.

But that would be an oversimplification. The story is told in a way that would work much better for a romance even bordering on a romantic comedy, with an absurd coincidence involving a pair of earrings driving the twists and turns of the plot.

We see a love triangle in which a man of action is forced, by the indiscretions of his wife to first enter denial and then acceptance of the realities of their marriage. He responds in truly the only way open to him… with melodramatic results.

So the light frivolity of a period romance and the serious underlying reality occur in parallel with the result that the film never achieves the weighty, ponderous tension of true melodrama. The audience is carried lightly from scene to scene, more interested in the weird perambulations of the earrings than in the disintegrating relationship underlying everything.

Until it explodes in an obvious but still unexpected denoument.

Bringing an audience to the end the director did without making it obvious (despite there being very few other possibilities) is an act of genius, and Max Ophüls is to be commended.

Gustavo Bondoni is an Argentine novelist and short story writer whose literary fiction is collected in Love and Death, a novel told in short story form which follows the intertwined lives of a dozen people who experience both love and death and show once again that these are the only two things worth writing about. You can check it out here.

The Golden Coach and Renoir Weirdness – in English

The Golden Coach (1952) is a gorgeous film. The color, the acting, the homage to the theater… it’s all wonderful. And make no mistake, this is an homage, unlike All About Eve’s colder, more realistic take on life on the stage.

I use the word “romp” quite a bit, but I don’t use it lightly. So many of the films that stay alive are ones that entertain in a somewhat over-the-top way that they can’t really be described any other way.

Well, this one is a romp. It concerns a fascinating actress, the headliner of a troupe that travels to a South American capital in early colonial times only to find that… well, they’ve traveled to a colony that is far from being a European capital of the time.

That, of course, doesn’t stop this actress from obtaining three different suitors, each of which exerts a different kind of fascination. It ends about as well as situations of that kind do, but we’re never heartbroken because the color and the action are much more farcical than dramatic. It’s a fun film as well as being gorgeous (it’s easily as beautiful as The Red Shoes, except with no serious dance).

Other than the film, what I found most interesting was that the only version I was able to track down was in English when I was expecting a French film befitting director Jean Renoir. In the end, I settled for the English-language version, thinking how well dubbed it had been… I only learned that it had originally been filmed in English when researching it for this post. Interesting.

I recommend this one. Watch it without expectations and you’ll be entertained in parts, and delighted in others.

Gustavo Bondoni is an Argentine novelist and short story writer whose latest book, Test Site Horror, is also a romp, but one with monsters and Russian special forces soldiers in it. Whether that makes it better or worse than The Golden Coach is a question left to the reader. But you can check it out here.