Letterboxd — Your life in film

Versayce.

Deftly mixes high and low arthouse (Godard at his poppiest hangs with Antonioni in hollow but charged frames) with anticipatory approaches to storytelling and mood that foresee films ranging from the angriest of New Hollywood's political works to DON'T LOOK NOW. The exchange of "Hey, what's my last name?" "What's my first name?" captures the longing underneath the most nihilistic of film genres.

Jaundiced color timing matches its view of post-industrial commerce, operated along lines of corruption instead of production. Despite operatic framing of this, existential trap of ex-con who finds legit world holds crimes of its own, even incestuous desires, Gray never uses his characters as symbolic props they way they can be in The Godfather. Someone on MUBI mentioned Rossellini in relation to the film's ending. Considering everything that comes before looks like a more personal, modestly scaled Cimino, a nod to another modernist master of the cinema seems about right.

Renoir's evocatively flat sets and carefully arranged placements turn to chaos with dance, as color and movement captures the messy human qualities that have more subtly disrupted his perfect framing in films past. An obvious companion piece with THE RED SHOES as a work that finds humor, despair, longing and fulfillment through art, and where artifice captures the world better than reality.

So perfectly constructed it can be easy to initially overlook its feeling of spontaneity and human interaction. Even a suicide attempt, framed indirectly by the pop of a light bulb, plays less as black comedy than an impossibly optimistic show of human empathy and interdependence. That its revelation of lovers' identities to each other occurs after all the bright lights have been turned off around them seems so fitting for a film that subtly inverts everything you expect while producing a paragon of generic entertainment.

My favorite Chaplin, a work that perverts his sentimental humanism into terrifying (but still funny) nihilism. Not so much the antithesis of the Tramp as a distillation of all the elements we normally overlook in the face of his underdog sympathy.

Longer review, plus notes on Criterion's new Blu-Ray: moviemezzanine.com/blu-ray-review-of-the-masterful-moniseur-verdoux/

Low-def DV and a narrator who speaks for his characters bridge myriad styles, moods and plots until cinema and literature are distilled into the simple, beautiful desire to connect with another human being. The Lola Gallo sequence is the film's own Molly Bloom chapter.

Noir types set against an abstract parallel dimension of gods that erases binaries by changing signs and signifiers so rapidly that the whole system collapses. Noir's moral ambiguities traded for ones of identity, with compositions that find an emotional truth even at the film's most alienating and confounding.