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100 Best Foreign Films (31-40) Earth (1930) The soil, the ground, its growth, the sunlight--and the human society from the grassy plains of the Ukraine. Alexander Dovzhenko was less a communist or a Soviet than a poet of the seasons and human renewal. This is the cinema of Vivaldi and van Gogh. (D.T.) L'Eclisse (1962) The third part of Antonioni's extraordinary trilogy on the chance for feeling in modern times (the first two parts are L'Avventura and La Notte). This one concerns the struggle between idealism and materialism. Monica Vitti and Alain Delon are the protagonists. He's a dealer on the exchange, and there are astonishing scenes of financial activity. But nothing matches the conclusion, when the characters fail to make a rendezvous and the camera helplessly notes the patience and perpetuity of life. (D.T.) 8 1/2 (1963) The narrative of Fellini's prescient, all-over-the-map phantasmagoria deals with the perils of giving carte blanche to a successful director. Mandatory viewing for everyone, not to mention any director blindsided by fame. (S.R.) Europa '51 (1952) When Ingrid Bergman gave up on Hollywood, she married Italian director Roberto Rossellini. Their films together are a meeting of old-fashioned romance and modern skepticism. In this one, Ingrid is a society wife whose child dies. She goes mad (or is it same?) and begins to work among the poor and the afflicted. She becomes a saint and an outcast. (D.T.) |
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Eyes Without a Face (1959) No, not the Michael Jackson story, but, in its fixation on better living through plastic surgery, pretty close. A young woman, horribly disfigured in a car crash, becomes the obsession of her plastic surgeon father, who begins "borrowing" the faces off other young women and grafting them onto her. The face-peeling scene packs a visceral punch akin to the razor-slitting-the-eye image in Un Chien Andalou. Georges Franju's waking nightmare finds terrible beauty in unexpected places: caged animals awaiting vivisection, the wraithlike heroine sleepwalking in a featureless mask. (S.R.) Fanny and Alexander (1983) Childhood, family, life, death, art, love, ghosts--the Bergman movie as Christmas feast for 30, all the way from the stuffed goose to the plum pudding. This luxuriously upholstered, three-hour-plus tour de force, Bergman's next-to-last, is both a summation of a career and the most user-friendly film he ever made. (M.A.) Floating Weeds (1959) Director Yasujiro Ozu had one subject--people, or family (which is to say, people seen through time). He had one way of watching--at a distance, detached, attentive, respectful. There has never been a truer style, or one capable of seeing so much. Take a trip into Japanese cinema and you will never go back to the American with your old complacency and confidence. (D.T.) |
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Forbidden Games (1952) RenŽ ClŽment's flat-out exquisite movie about how children create a fantasy bulwark against reality. While Europe is hammered by the Second World War and grown-ups all around them seem petty and small, a newly orphaned, homeless young girl and a peasant boy find grace, beauty and solace in burying dead animals. (S.R.) The Four Hundred Blows (1959) Raw, unpolished, shot on the run and true to the bone, Francois Truffaut's autobio directorial debut is still the most desperate movie ever made about childhood. (M.A.) Gertrud (1964) In Carl Dreyer's last film, a married woman gives up her husband and a life of order for a younger man, a musician. It seems like just a small story, a women's picture of the sort that Joan Crawford made. But Dreyer sees the situation as a model for every drama of liberty and happiness. In the end, as in the beginning, the great subject in movies is the human face as it begins to think and feel. (D.T.) 100 Best Foreign Films, Part 5 (41-50) |