I never feel like I can keep up with a Desplechin movie, they’re always way ahead of me in terms of what tf is going on, but he and the actors seem so convinced by and in tune with the strange little emotional world they’re in. I feel the same with Cassavetes a lot of the time. Marianne Denicourt makes some weird, fascinating choices in this.
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L'Atalante 1934
I approached this as usual, like a canonical chore! It's petty and a nuisance, but I don't like my completist bent, I don't want movie homework, and so I can sometimes be less open hearted than I'd like to be when it comes to the real macdaddies of film academe, like this one.
There's usually some sort of technical board pin to spot. The first film to employ such-and-such. Poetic Realism in the case of this film, apprently. But that…
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Beau Travail 1999
I don't want to harp on too much about Beau Travail's ending, but I'm always halfway terrified, halfway covetous! It evokes total awe, and ultimately an itch for that same deliverance. In those beautiful closing moments, Galoup explores every sense and every impulse that he had previously disallowed himself. His senses were muted and his tenderness hardened, until time and fatigue started to ware down his discipline. Galoup represent a kind of inscrutable masculinity that is never fully known or…
