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“... Xavier Giannoli’s​ Illusions perdues won a raft of César awards this year, including for best film, best cinematography and best adaptation. This success seems like something of a fable, since the film itself is all about winning and losing. And the prize for the adaptation, which was undertaken by Giannoli with Jacques Fieschi and Yves Stavrides, is perhaps the most interesting, since the film feels less like a version of Balzac’s novel (written between 1837 and 1843) than an exemplification of Balzac’s theory of history, a sort of fancy dress version of a time much closer to us than the early 19th century ...”

“... The Peruvian poet​ César Vallejo wrote in a famous sonnet that he would die in Paris on a rainy Thursday. He lived in Paris, it rains quite a bit there, especially for poets, and he had a one in seven chance of being right about the day. In fact, he died in Paris on a Friday. It was raining. The poem isn’t so much a near-miss prophecy as a piece of lugubrious theatre, playing with what used to be called mentalism ...”

“... Ryusuke​ Hamaguchi admits that he worried about his film, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy: ‘I was actually scared that maybe I was writing the same story three times.’ We don’t have to take him literally – the stories are not that similar and he knows what he’s doing – but it’s an interesting thought. In each story, as in Hamaguchi’s recent Drive My Car (2021), which was nominated for four Oscars, there are characters who don’t know what to do with knowledge they can’t share, or that they have chosen not to share ...”

“... I’m not much given to feeling that images make words look poor – often they make them look rich and friendly – but that was certainly my response to two recent viewings of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), to be screened again at the BFI Southbank from 29 April. Of course the words that look poor here are quite particular: the weakly loaded phrases of the screenplay; the large abstractions of propaganda; the miniature conceptual monuments Eisenstein seems to want to create through visual sequences that become de facto propositions ...”

“... There are artfully self-conscious moments in Raúl Ruiz’s Time Regained (1999) which distract us briefly from the film’s amazing achievement: to reveal the last volume of Proust’s intellectual monument (and by implication the rest of the work) for the intricate social soap opera it also is, a universe of stars appropriately represented by Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Béart and others ...”

“... Where is the corpse? Who was the man? Why did this woman die? How did she die? These questions are all raised and answered in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once upon a Time in Anatolia, but they are constantly displaced during the running of the movie by other, more abstract riddles. Why is this film noir so preoccupied with light? Why is it so busy making squalor look beautiful? Is beauty a problem or a dangerous solution? Is it the film’s problem or its subject? We see a lighted room, three men eating ...”

“... The two characters at the centre of Rossellini’s Journey to Italy, seen in a restored print at the BFI Southbank, are so nasty to each other in their half-polite way that you long for them to flare up, throw things, become violent, turn the film into the melodrama it seems to want to be. They don’t, though. When they agree to divorce it’s as if they were ordering a meal in a restaurant they don’t like; and when they embrace at the end of the movie in a notional reconciliation, a rediscovery of their supposed affection for each other, it’s even worse ...”

“... Only God forgives’ could be the motto for many crime stories, starting with Dostoevsky and perhaps earlier. One of the most pointed if least high-toned of its meanings suggests that human forgiveness is bad for business in the underworld, because it undermines discipline and encourages rogue initiatives. Better leave it to God and stick to punishment instead ...”

“... Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant provokes two questions even before we’ve thought much about the film. Both are about timing. Why did it take the best part of a year after its US premiere to find a screen in the UK? And why does the film itself take so long to find out what sort of work it wants to be? It becomes a pretty amazing movie when it does find out, but – this would be a supplementary question – why couldn’t Herzog have found out before or during shooting, or even in the editing room? Was he waiting for Nicolas Cage to turn into Klaus Kinski on the screen? It is possible that the second set of questions is itself an answer to the first ...”

“... What would you get if you combined The Great Dictator with Pulp Fiction and shifted the scene to France? One answer might be Quentin Tarantino’s new film, Inglourious Basterds, but it’s not a great answer because the film itself is so many things. Of the identifiable movies within its fanciful confines, one is rather good, another is so bad you have to like it and the third is just meandering ...”

“... We know​ what black comedy is but I wonder whether some stories don’t call for another colour. Pale grey, for example, might be about right for Anne Fontaine’s Gemma Bovery (2014), a stately, not obviously funny film in which an English woman stumbles into Flaubert’s plot and dies not deliberately by arsenic poisoning but accidentally by swallowing, or rather failing to swallow, a chunk of baguette ...”

“... The first thing​ Estrella remembers being told about her father, in Victor Erice’s shadowy masterpiece The South, is that before she was born he predicted her sex and gave her a name. ‘It is a very intense image,’ she says in voiceover at the beginning of the film, ‘that in fact I made up.’ She made it up, but we have just witnessed the scene, the pregnant mother on the bed that is now the daughter’s, the father sitting there waving the pendant he uses to make his prophecies ...”

“... Much​ of what Pauline Kael had to say in ‘Raising Kane’ (1971), her long article in the New Yorker, got lost in the controversy it created. One of her aims was to draw attention to Herman Mankiewicz’s role in writing the screenplay for Citizen Kane (1941), and therefore in the success of the film. But, more interestingly, she was also evoking a whole school of New York writers, for whom Mankiewicz could be made to stand representative: a set of wisecracking, worldly figures supposedly attracted to Hollywood by the prospect of copious easy money, who created not a genre of film, but rather a style that prepared the way for Citizen Kane ...”

“... We​ have seen so many other worlds in movies recently that shabby domestic realism, showing the details of a marriage and its break-up, real streets and familiar furniture, can come as something of a shock. The shock is all the greater when the leading characters, like Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, come from those other worlds ...”

“... It’s​ not the main function of great fictional characters to provide platforms for the careers of others, but they do the job very well. In a new film, Sherlock Holmes walks into Inspector Lestrade’s office and announces that he has solved a particular case. Lestrade is pleased, and says he has two questions. The first is how did Holmes do it? Holmes offers a detailed answer ...”