Le souffle au coeur (Murmur of the Heart) (1971)

I began this project before I started the blog, which has put me in a bit of a blogging pickle (aka a bloickle). See, I've already watched about six movies (mostly TFC suggestions) and I've only written about one. I've begun writing another, but to do it justice it takes some time, more than I've got most days. So while I'm stewing over this one, the details of others are getting lost in the recesses of my memory somewhere.

So let's get realistic here, and just knock a few of 'em out quick and get this thing up to speed. I'll begin with Le souffle au coeur (Murmur of the Heart) (1971) and try to get to Ran (1985), Bullit (1968), The Rules of the Game (1939), and 8 1/2 ((1963) before next week.

MOTH, as even the acronym of the English translation suggests, is an Oedipian tale of a bit too much mother-love. Revealing this much doesn't at all ruin the film, which any viewer who still registers a brain wave when he hits play on his DVD player (admittedly this leaves out a good portion of today's movie watchers. Wow, aren't I a prick sometimes?) sees coming from the first ten minutes. What you want to see this film for is it's jazz-fueled, Proust-quoting, materially affluent but sexually frustrated protagonist, Laurent Chevalier. Laurent is well-played by Benoît Ferreux; his portrayal is subtle, with all the adolescent mama's boy vulnerability it asks for. This picture says it all:

And see it for the scenes with his brothers: two boys so bored with riches that their entire lives seem to revolve around goofy antics: constantly pestering their Hispanic house maid in really funny ways, replacing a priceless painting belonging to their parents with a cheap replica so they can destroy it in front of them, etc. All this lighthearted hilarity at the center of all of their lives is what makes the movie all the more disturbing. That we, the film's viewers, can spot the trouble beneath it all so quickly, trouble that no one in the family knows is there, gives the story its weight. The director, Louis Malle, drops subtle (I use that word again because subtlety is exactly what makes this film work so well) hints along the way that things aren't quite right, are perhaps leading in a dangerous direction--and this gives the film's climactic moments a troubling sense of inevitability, of fate. Born into such a family with such a mother, what chance does Laurent have not to turn out completely fucked up? We see a lifetime of therapy and bad relationships ahead, at the very least.

But more disturbing than the what-happens is the very final moments (which I won't give away). It's downright shocking, though really nothing further actually happens in it. It feels to me like the only appropriate ending, and one that not many directors would have the cahones to give it.



Up next: Ran

More on the List (sorry)

I know this part is totally boring, but I feel the need to be up front and open about my system of choosing films (since I began this project by declaring a need for one), and as I'm still working it out it seems relevant to the blog. Feel free to skip to the next post.

What bothers me about simply consulting a list of the "greatest films ever" is that there is generally no logical progression to them. They're just a list of good uns, and you can't from such a list place each film into its influential role in film history, or say, hey, this one was part of this movement, etc. Yes, I realize that what I'm asking for is for someone else to do the hard work for me--but hell, it's been done, right? These films have been categorized in certain ways, and I'd like to be able to see them in those ways.

So I guess what I'm looking for are two things: 1) a chronological guide to film movements and 2) a comprehensive list of the generally-agreed-upon greatest/most influential movies evah. Armed with these, I can choose a well-rounded queue that covers the big bases, and understand where each movie fits in.

There are two libraries within a reasonable distance of my home, but a search for a general guide to film history has turned up instead about a thousand more specialized books: about 800 of them are on film noir alone for some reason (I've never noticed anything especially hard-boiled about this generally sunny little southern town--what's with the noir zeal?), another bunch on French New Wave, a plethora on adaptations and specific directors, etc. But hell, I'm not trying to get a degree here. I think maybe I'm looking for a coffee table book with big illustrated time lines and "Fun Fact" boxes. Like, oh, something you might find on the Internet. Anyone got an idea?

As far as places to find lists, I've discovered this website that you probably already all know about: It's called They Shoot Pictures Don't They? . From the site's main menu you can visit some really helpful and interesting things, such as director pages all the way from A-Z; an assembled list of the 1,000 Greatest Films, "[a]s voted by 2,041 critics, filmmakers, reviewers, scholars and other likely film types;" a page for the best films of the 21st century; and, get this!--a link to a page for exactly one featured film genre--film noir! The world is going crazy for the stuff!

I'm most interested in this site for it's Big List, but 1,000 is an intimidating number when you've only got one summer and a postal lag between you and your queue. But you can click on the top 200 directors from the list, or view just the top 400 films, and the big list even comes with a PDF companion for people with even lonelier lives than the author of this blog lives. In the PDF doc, the makers of the list boast "a reasonably complicated set of formulas" used to compile it, but as they don't divulge this magical equation, and since I wouldn't understand it if they did, I'm just gonna take their word for it (despite that they don't provide any real reason for declaring some lists too "dubious" to draw from--like Maxim's "100 Greatest Guy Movies Ever Made"--I guess it's the word "Guy" in there that discredits it, because what is a "guy" movie or a "chick flick" anyway, right? Don't label us, Maxim!).

All this to say, I think I've found a suitable list to draw from, but I'm still not clear on how to proceed. Do I tackle the top directors? Start at the top of the top 400 films? Skip every other film? Find my film movements guide and choose one from each? Choose at random?

Thoughts?

For now, I'm still picking rather willy nilly from The Film Club's recommendations, and I've already watched several that I owe--what do I call these things? reviews? overviews? primers?--Twerp's Guides! to. After lunch I may just tackle Murmur of the Heart (1971).

The List

A few words and a call for help about The List I am searching for. The List, of course, is the hypothetical, elusive Best Of film catalog, a sort of Platonic ideal of movie critics' picks. In reality, of course, there is no such thing. There are as many lists of films any self-titled movie know-it-all should see as there are movie know-it-alls. Perhaps what I'm interested in is where they tend to overlap?

Let's be practical. I've got a summer here, and actually I've only got evenings in the summer (during the day I'm mostly planning classes and learning Spanish), and then all hell breaks loose when I start teaching four courses in the fall. I won't be watching many movies then. So I'm not going to watch every great movie ever made in the next few months.

Nor do I just want to hit the cornerstones of each movement and genre, those films that are called most influential. I'd like a little more leeway than that, and I'd like to keep in my selections a bit of the spirit of how we choose movies: we look through titles and descriptions and posters and DVD covers and we land on ones that interest us. I'd like to balance my queue between these two things. How about some rules?

1. I will only choose movies that are generally agreed upon as "great" or "influential" in some way by smarty-pants critics.

2. I will hit each major film movement (aka French New Wave, New Hollywood, Dogme 95, German Expressionism, etc)

3. I'm not going to bother to do so chronologically or by any other logical arrangement (though I began this blog by saying otherwise), as I am bound by certain constraints: I have only the cheapest Netflix subscription, which means that I can only have 1 DVD out at a time. During DVD postal transits, I watch movies from my queue that are available to stream over the Internet, which dictates what I can watch when. Also, I prefer jumping around a bit so as not to get bogged down in any one style of filmmaking for too long. I mean, this isn't a fucking class, people. Cut me some slack.

4. I have trouble sleeping if I watch horror films, because I'm a generally unreasonable person, easily given to supernatural frights due in part to a strange religious upbringing. I may skip this genre altogether, satisfied that I've seen The Exorcist, which scared the living shit out of me and reinforced my old Protestant notion that Catholics are scary.

I guess that's enough for now. I'm off to search some lists and maybe find a history of film book at the library. Feel free to post list or book ideas for me in the comments.

For now, stay tuned for the following:

Bullit (1968)
Murmur of the Heart (1971)
The Rules of the Game (1939)

The Last Detail (1973)

"This kid ain't goin' anywhere. On the outside too many bad things can happen to him. This way the worst part's already behind him."

"I am the motherfucking shore patrol!"

– 'Bad Ass' Buddusky

In 1975 my journey began in Norfolk, VA, and only two years earlier The Last Detail chronicled a journey that also began there. You might think from the film's poster image that this is a homoerotic Naval adventure shot in Nicholson's off years, but it's actually about a few guys on a pretty sad (and often hilarious) journey, with no gay love scenes whatsoever. Two sailors, Billy "Bad Ass" Buddusky (Jack Nicholson) and "Mule" Mulhall (Otis Young) are ordered to escort a third, Larry Meadows (Randy Quaid) to prison in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he is to serve eight years for stealing $40 from an officer's favorite charity. Meadows isn't the brightest bulb, and he's a bit shy and afraid of life; a foil for Buddusky, who likes to get shit riled up. Along the way the escorts feel bad for Meadows and set about showing him a good time by trying to get him drunk and laid and into fights (you get the idea he's never done any of the above). It's as fun as it sounds, probably more.

The film is directed by Hal Ashby, who also directed such greats as Harold and Maude (1971), Being There (1979), Shampoo (1975), and Coming Home (1978).

According to a quick scan of Wikipedia (hey, come on, I saved you the trouble), Ashby was a long-haired vegetarian hippie type, and his career was often noted as much for great film making as for sporadic declines into drugs and bizarre behavior like hiring his ex-girlfriends, who had no editing experience, to edit his films. His wife was pissed at him until her death for his portrayal of her in Shampoo, but not, apparently, pissed enough to divorce him. At one point, to prove he was respectable again, he began showing up to Hollywood parties donning an unremarkable blue blazer. None of this seems all that weird to me, actually.

The making of The Last Detail pissed off Columbia, who was financing it, in all sorts of ways. They hated the jumpy cuts, the constant swearing of the sailors in the script, the time it was taking to edit the thing, and Ashby's disappearing act near the end of editing. According to David Gilmour, it was Nicholson who finally convinced them to lay off Ashby about the expletives.

But look, this is all what the movement known as "New Hollywood" was about--taking the reigns from the producers and giving it to directors and actors, people who had a stake in things artistically. For those of you who don't know what this movement was all about, I won't get too into it in-depth here (has nothing to do with being unable to, of course), but a quick Internet search is probably sufficient to give you the big ideas behind it--that it is generally seen to stretch from the mid-60s to the early 80s. That it worked because studios had been losing money on musicals and historical epics. That their audience was growing more educated and intellectually demanding, so they had to deal with long-haired hippie types like Ashby and Nicholson, people who didn't return their calls and wore unimpressive blue blazers to highfalutin movie star parties, but who could tell a story in a new and interesting way.

A lot of smart people (including JN himself) call this one Nicholson's finest performance, and it takes about ten minutes into the movie to know that they are probably right about that. First, I've never seen such great portrayals of drunk guys in a hotel room by any actor, ever, so much so that I'm not entirely convinced they weren't actually shitfaced during filming. And truthfully, all three actors do a hell of a job with that. I've never seen Nicholson in particular so natural, and I'm talking about a master here, about Jack Fucking Nicholson. But I have to agree, this is probably his best role. He nails it.

What I really liked about this movie was its building suspense, created by both the plot (the journey to prison, or escape, or death--who knows?) and the characters' combustible combination (particularly Buddusky with Meadows). Buddusky, for reasons that feel somehow both completely mysterious an entirely plausible, seems to be coming unhinged from early in the movie, a coming apart that is somehow triggered by escorting this innocent-faced young man to spend a good portion of his good years behind bars (while maintaining that this is exactly what Meadows wants). Where is all this pent up rage and nuttiness coming from? We sense that it's about bigger things in Buddusky's life, things that even he doesn't know about, perhaps.

There's one scene, which I won't give away, when you would not be surprised no matter what the outcome is. And to achieve that in any narrative is absolute success. To achieve it in a movie is not only success of writing and directing, but of performance. You believe that the person in whose hands the outcome of the scene rests could do any number of things, and you wouldn't be all that surprised. That's great acting, directing, and writing.

And of course there are great moments of drunken stupidity, an awkward bathroom fight scene, and lots of great lines.

I'll leave you with this classic scene:

The Movie Twerp

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. says in his last prehumously published book of essays, Man Without a Country, that anyone who has not read "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," is a twerp. Maybe you will agree or disagree with such snobbery, but I don't argue with a genius, dead or alive. But let me get back to this discussion of twerpishness and snobbery. First, a few words about who I am and what this blog hopes to accomplish, if anything.

I graduated this May with a MFA in fiction writing, and I will continue teaching college English courses full-time this fall. In the meantime, I'm sitting around my apartment a lot, reading, planning courses, re-learning Spanish from an arrogant and demeaning computer program, hosting cook outs, running out of money, and watching movies alone every night while polishing off a six pack of Yuengling (canned--it's best that way--trust me).

I recently read The Film Club, by David Gilmour, after it was loaned to me by my friend and fellow MFA grad (who has, by the way, been accepted for the Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship in Provincetown, MA, so--holla). The Film Club is a memoir about a former film critic/TV personality/novelist who makes a deal with his son, who is failing out of high school: the boy can drop out, if he'll watch three movies a week with him.

It's a quick read, a "page turner," as they call such dessertish literary pleasures, and it holds your interest in two ways: 1) the story itself is captivating (is this kid gonna make it? is he gonna get an even hotter girlfriend next time? will his career as a white suburban hip hop artist pan out?) and 2) the intelligent discussion of the films they watch together. The book is worth it for this second aspect alone, but it doesn't have to rely on it. If you're a sucker like me for father-son stories that remind you nothing of your own father-son experience, other than that you really missed out on that crucial aspect of life, you'll shed a tear or two by the end. But what this book has to do with this blog is simply this: it gave my nightly movie watching ritual a structure, some goals. Kind of like it did for David Gilmour's son, I guess.

I've always loved movies. New ones, old ones, foreign ones, confusing ones, long ones, slow ones, short ones, fast ones. On a boat, in a moat, in a car, with a guitar, whatever. I've been devouring them, along with novels, for most of my life. And as with most art (music, books, etc), I've been kind of a self-righteous prick about it, a snob, if you will. I have justified my high-horsemanship by a few key things:

a) I know good shit when I see it, and don't argue with me, pal.

b) I know bad shit when I see it, too. I just do!

c) I've read enough renowned film critics as well as interviews/books by their favorite directors to know that I am generally "right" about the above two points. It's like when Johnny Cash started covering a bunch of tunes on his last few albums, and by and large, he was covering my favorite artists and songs. It was very validating as a music snob.

Regarding point c: I was in a very lame and tipsy argument about a year ago with two holier-than-though PC tyrants who, when exasperated by my superior logic and rhetoric, threw up their hands and declared that I simply hadn't read the books they had read, and therefore could not possibly understand what they saw in situation X. Now, if they had been more privy than I to some primary source of information or experience, say, if they had lived through the thing we were debating (I'm going to great pains not to say what this debate was about, you see), then I'd have granted them a valid point. All this to say, I don't want to rely too heavily on secondary sources for my film knowledge, and so my major motivation is to fill in the more obvious gaps it suffers from when it comes to primary materials (the actual movies I've watched or haven't watched).

You see, unlike my history with books, for instance, in which I have had a pretty formal education, my film education has been haphazard, willy nilly, and seat-of-my-pants. Someone I know recommends something, or I happen to notice it in the library, or it's out in the theater, and I watch it. No rhyme or reason to it. In short, when it comes to films, as much as I'd love to continue believing myself to be educated enough to say with Vonnegut that you sir, if you have not even bothered to watch Film So and So, are a twerp--well, gulp, I'm the twerp.

That's not to say that I haven't watched a hell of a lot of the greatest and most influential movies. Ask me anything about the great westerns and gangster movies (Sergio Leone, need I say more?), or about Pedro Almodóvar Caballero's deftly drawn female characters. Sure, let's discuss Woody Allen or Martin Scorcese till we're purple; I can hang, bro. Ask me almost anything about GlenGarry Glenn Ross Talk to me about a few very specific things, and I'll snob it up with the best of you. But don't ask me about French art movies--I've still only, sadly, seen a handful (twerp). Or about too many specific fifties films (super twerp).

And so The Film Club, combined with my long, leisurely summer and my recent feelings of twerpishness when it comes to major gaps in movie knowledge, has inspired me to proceed now in a somewhat orderly fashion through a list or possibly a few lists of films (to be determined) that any self-declared film buff ought to have seen before he starts making others feel small for talking about what a great movie Avatar was. After all, I'd like to remain an amateur snob, and I don't want anyone calling me out on my creds and being all like, "Have you even seen The 400 Blows dude?" Well, my hypothetical snob-esis, ask me again in the fall.

So I'm loading my Netflix queue with the best movies ever made, according to smarter film buffs than I. For now, I'm using Gilmour's book and searching for a more comprehensive (but do-able this summer) list. Until then...up first are The Last Detail (1973) and Murmur of the Heart (1971), because Gilmour made them both sound indispensable. Stay posted, dear readers, for one lonely English major's amateur twerpish take on the best movies ever made.