Paris Landmarks, Eiffel Tower
Brigitte et Brigitte (1966)
directed by Luc Moullet
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults
Nothing makes me as appreciative of professionals as a movie from the French New Wave rendered meaningless by Facets' sloppy authoring on their release for Luc Moullet's A Girl is a Gun. You can imagine the appeal for me in a title like that, but apparently no one bothered to make sure that subtitles would actually appear on the DVD release. They're supposed to, but they don't. Angry, I burned the second disc of The Luc Moullet Collection instead, hoping to one day find some satisfaction in the director's first feature, Brigitte and Brigitte.
I'm happy to say I did, although, when they do appear, Facets' translations are one high school essay away from incomprehensible. But Claude Chabrol, Samuel Fuller, and Eric Rohmer (not looking a day over 65) make funny cameos. Both heroines meet at the Austerlitz train station and become roommates; they tour Paris, make jokes about Alfred Hitchcock, and, like the director, don't take their stories too seriously. A friendship from the page of my old movie daydreams.
As a critic at Cahiers du Cinéma, Moullet wrote a lot of wonderful things about Fuller - among them, that Fuller "pretends to adopt all points of view, and that's what makes his humor sublime." Brigitte is a far cry from something really special like Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle. Sometimes it's even tiresome, but I can imagine Rohmer watching this in 1966 and thinking, "maybe I ought to make women my heroes, and not just the philosophical quandaries of self-involved protagonists." Maybe this was the movie that made my favorite director just that.
directed by Luc Moullet
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults
Nothing makes me as appreciative of professionals as a movie from the French New Wave rendered meaningless by Facets' sloppy authoring on their release for Luc Moullet's A Girl is a Gun. You can imagine the appeal for me in a title like that, but apparently no one bothered to make sure that subtitles would actually appear on the DVD release. They're supposed to, but they don't. Angry, I burned the second disc of The Luc Moullet Collection instead, hoping to one day find some satisfaction in the director's first feature, Brigitte and Brigitte.
I'm happy to say I did, although, when they do appear, Facets' translations are one high school essay away from incomprehensible. But Claude Chabrol, Samuel Fuller, and Eric Rohmer (not looking a day over 65) make funny cameos. Both heroines meet at the Austerlitz train station and become roommates; they tour Paris, make jokes about Alfred Hitchcock, and, like the director, don't take their stories too seriously. A friendship from the page of my old movie daydreams.
As a critic at Cahiers du Cinéma, Moullet wrote a lot of wonderful things about Fuller - among them, that Fuller "pretends to adopt all points of view, and that's what makes his humor sublime." Brigitte is a far cry from something really special like Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle. Sometimes it's even tiresome, but I can imagine Rohmer watching this in 1966 and thinking, "maybe I ought to make women my heroes, and not just the philosophical quandaries of self-involved protagonists." Maybe this was the movie that made my favorite director just that.
posted by NPK at 8:15 AM
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