 |
|
|
100 Best Foreign Films (11-20) The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) German writer-director Rainer Werner Fassbinder's sourest, funniest and most glamorous film is a remake of an American melodrama. It is decadently beautiful, humorously corrupt, claustrophobically intimate, and so acidic it can bring tears to your eyes. (D.T.) The Blue Angel (1930) Josef von Sternberg went to Berlin to do a story of a pompous teacher who is seduced and humiliated by a cabaret singer. The great actor Emil Jannings was the teacher, and for the woman, Lola-Lola, Sternberg "discovered" and fell in love with a strapping blonde singer who could look at a man as if his clothes were feathers--it was Marlene Dietrich, who was a genius for von Sternberg and rather ordinary for anyone else. (D.T.) Le Boucher (1969) First you figure that Claude Chabrol's muted movie will set its sights on a nice enough-seeming guy who, when he isn't butchering animals, butchers women. Things grow richer and stranger when the murderer becomes involved with, and transformed by, a sexually repressed village schoolteacher. A two-hander brilliantly played by Jean Yanne and the essential Stephane Audran. (S.R.) Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932) Jean Renoir's acidly humane comedy about an ungrateful bum taken up as a charity case by a bourgeois family is enough to make you sucker punch the next panhandler who bums change from you. Some of the movie's glories found their way into the inspired 1936 screwball comedy My Man Godfrey. Many years later Paul Mazursky hopelessly muddled the same raw material in Down and Out in Beverly Hills. (S.R.) |
 |
|
|
Breathless (1960) Jean-Luc Godard's first feature has much to account for. Its breezy amorality, its fusion of Keystone Kops with film noir, its made-it-up-as-we-went-along zing, and its simultaneous deconstruction/worshipping of Hollywood genres have infected an extraordinary number of key movies, from A Hard Day's Night to Bonnie and Clyde to Pulp Fiction. Don't let the movie's lofty reputation scare you off; it's amiably cheesy, likable, innovative and, with smashing-looking Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in the leads, fatally glamorous. (S.R.) The Burmese Harp (1956) Masquerading as a Buddhist monk in order to return to his unit, a Japanese soldier travels through the WWII killing fields and eventually commits himself to burying the uncountable dead. A decade after WWII ended, the Japanese made the most heartbreaking antiwar film ever. (M.A.) Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974) Celine and Julie are a pair of madcap Alices looking for Wonderland. Their friendship leads first to a house, and then to the drama that is forever occurring, or playing, there. Can they rescue the little girl who seems to be trapped in this story? Hilarious, profound, a metaphor for filmgoing and fiction as a whole--this is a sublime film. But in this best of all possible worlds, our America, it is both unavailable and hardly heard of. Perhaps we have made it up? (D.T.) |
|
|
|
|
La Chienne (1931) Early sound film by Jean Renoir about a timid, married clerk (the unique Michael Simon) who takes up with a cheap whore and finds himself a murderer. It's as if, all at once, poetic realism and tragicomic anecdote had been invented for the first time. Renoir's vision is still as fresh and startling as a cut lemon. (D.T.) Children of Paradise (1945) How great is Marcel Carne's once-in-a-lifetime epic set among a ragtag 19th-century theatrical troupe? Put it this way: its hero is a lovestruck mime and we still love it. Heart-piercing performances by Jean-Louis Barrault and Arletty, playing mismatched lovers. Sumptuous and sublime, top to bottom. (S.R.) The Conformist (1971) A tale that identifies ordinary guilt and sexual shame as the roots of fascism. The best work of director Bernardo Bertolucci, cameraman Vittorio Storaro, designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti and actor Jean-Louis Trintignant. And that is saying something. Beautiful, sinister and hugely influential. (D.T.) 100 Best Foreign Films, Part 3 (21-30) |