The Trials of Honest Labor
Le Bonheur (1965)
directed by Agnès Varda
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the Squirrel Hill Public Library
A pretty French girl in a sundress on a picnic puts out a campfire with a bottle of mineral water. It's summertime, and with her husband and her kids, she participates in a Sunday scene of domesticity. Like Eric Rohmer, my favorite Frenchman, Varda makes movies about the young people around her; she considers the world a better place than some do, but one with a number of small problems that those who don't belong to the middle class ignore.
The husband works as a carpenter and the wife as a seamstress. He is happy, but believes that "happiness works by addition," and falls in love with a postal clerk. Varda lets the affair come about in an easy, believable way, in part due to her sympathies for the fatigue that any working man or working woman feels at the end of an average day. Needless to say, the movie looks as beautiful as any movie can, and if most movies were half as pretty, the modern world would be much less ordinary - which, again, is part of her point, empathizer that she is.
Mr. Jealousy (1997)
directed by Noah Baumbach
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on VHS from the Squirrel Hill Public Library
If you have a hard time making it through my effort to say something good about Arabian Nights, you'll appreciate my less complicated but no more enthusiastic endorsement of Mr. Jealousy. I saw Kicking and Screaming in college, enjoyed it, but liked Chris Eigeman better in Whit Stillman films. The Squid and the Whale was bad enough to make me never want to say anything good about Kicking and Screaming again, but there I was at the library, looking at Mr. Jealousy, and here I am and here it is.
You can see why Wes Anderson recruited Noah Baumbach to help write screenplays, why Woody Allen fans probably like him, and why Baumbach still gets paid to direct. That isn't all meant to be negative. Mr. Jealousy begins with a 15-year old version of Eric Stoltz taking his date to The Rules of the Game while the soundtrack to Jules and Jim plays behind them, and that pretty much sums up the rest of the picture. Both witty and smarmy, it's funniest when the jokes approach slapstick and center more on a sudden camera pan than anything anyone has to say.
Or maybe it's just me, and I still have a soft spot for this stuff in spite of myself. But Bogdanovich as a therapist two years before The Sopranos? Eigeman as "Dashiell Frank," the hottest new thing in fiction? The sweet-natured moralism at the heart of the movie - try to be a better person for the sake of those who love you - is innocent enough, and one can always do worse than a romance.
directed by Agnès Varda
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the Squirrel Hill Public Library
A pretty French girl in a sundress on a picnic puts out a campfire with a bottle of mineral water. It's summertime, and with her husband and her kids, she participates in a Sunday scene of domesticity. Like Eric Rohmer, my favorite Frenchman, Varda makes movies about the young people around her; she considers the world a better place than some do, but one with a number of small problems that those who don't belong to the middle class ignore.
The husband works as a carpenter and the wife as a seamstress. He is happy, but believes that "happiness works by addition," and falls in love with a postal clerk. Varda lets the affair come about in an easy, believable way, in part due to her sympathies for the fatigue that any working man or working woman feels at the end of an average day. Needless to say, the movie looks as beautiful as any movie can, and if most movies were half as pretty, the modern world would be much less ordinary - which, again, is part of her point, empathizer that she is.
Mr. Jealousy (1997)
directed by Noah Baumbach
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on VHS from the Squirrel Hill Public Library
If you have a hard time making it through my effort to say something good about Arabian Nights, you'll appreciate my less complicated but no more enthusiastic endorsement of Mr. Jealousy. I saw Kicking and Screaming in college, enjoyed it, but liked Chris Eigeman better in Whit Stillman films. The Squid and the Whale was bad enough to make me never want to say anything good about Kicking and Screaming again, but there I was at the library, looking at Mr. Jealousy, and here I am and here it is.
You can see why Wes Anderson recruited Noah Baumbach to help write screenplays, why Woody Allen fans probably like him, and why Baumbach still gets paid to direct. That isn't all meant to be negative. Mr. Jealousy begins with a 15-year old version of Eric Stoltz taking his date to The Rules of the Game while the soundtrack to Jules and Jim plays behind them, and that pretty much sums up the rest of the picture. Both witty and smarmy, it's funniest when the jokes approach slapstick and center more on a sudden camera pan than anything anyone has to say.
Or maybe it's just me, and I still have a soft spot for this stuff in spite of myself. But Bogdanovich as a therapist two years before The Sopranos? Eigeman as "Dashiell Frank," the hottest new thing in fiction? The sweet-natured moralism at the heart of the movie - try to be a better person for the sake of those who love you - is innocent enough, and one can always do worse than a romance.
posted by NPK at 6:05 AM
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