My Little Loves – R. Emmet Sweeney

December 27, 2016

As 2016 staggers to a close, I am looking back at the pockets of film pleasure I enjoyed from the year that was. This season is clogged with lists, and here I offer another, though one more suited to the historically minded viewers of TCM and FilmStruck. It is a list of my favorite old movies that I viewed for the first time over the past twelve months. These came from all over – rare MoMA film prints, old Warner Brothers DVDs, and yes, from streaming titles on FilmStruck. It’s an eclectic grouping of arts high and low, from all over the world. I hope it points you in some different cinema directions in 2017, or at least diverts your attention from current events for a few minutes. So prematurely, let me wish you all a Happy New Year, and I hope you’ll continue reading our little blog in the year to come.

The below list is in alphabetical order

Any Which Way You Can (1980), directed by Buddy Van Horn

Raucously entertaining Clint Eastwood-orangutan buddy comedy in which a bare knuckle brawl tears down Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The sequel to Every Which Way But Loose (1978), this one shunts tough guy Philo Beddoe (Eastwood) into a mob-backed big money fight against infamous fighter Jack Wilson (William Smith). Most of the run time is spent on the road, as Eastwood pals around with his yokel brother Orville (Geoffrey Lewis) on a trip to Wyoming. Ruth Gordon is on hand as their combative battle ax mother, tougher than both her kids combined. The real star, of course, is Clyde the orangutan, an expressive primate who loves Philo and despises the cops who try to break up their fun. The chaos builds into a full-on brawling blowout that tears up the Jackson Hole countryside. All that plus a killer title song sung by Ray Charles and Clint himself.

Emperor of the North (1973), directed by Robert Aldrich

In Emperor of the North (1973) the Hobo and the Railroad Man are respective avatars of chaos and order, bloody abstractions who engage in a near-wordless duel to the death on a train rumbling through the Pacific Northwest. They have no back stories or personal motivation, they simply fight because it is in their nature, and the other one is there. Though the film is set in 1933 during the Depression, the story seems to take place outside history on a plane of pure hatred. Director Robert Aldrich expertly channels this hate in an elemental chase film in which stars Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin tear out chunks of each other’s flesh to perpetuate their mutually solitary ways of life. It was released last year on Blu-ray from Twilight Time.

Her Man (1930), directed by Tay Garnett

Tay Garnett’s Her Man (1930) has had a small but enduring auteurist cult, for those lucky enough to have seen the Cinematheque Francaise print that circulated in the ’50s and ’60s. In his American Cinema, Andrew Sarris wrote of its “extraordinarily fluid camera movements that dispel the myth of static talkies,” while British critic Raymond Durgnat compared it favorably to Howard Hawks’ A Girl in Every Port (1928). Poet John Ashbery saw it in Paris in the late ’50s, and it was an inspiration for his “Pavane pour Helen Twelvetrees,” which you can read here. The film has seemingly disappeared from view since then, with David Thomson erroneously stating that it was a “lost film” in his Biographical Dictionary of Film. It wasn’t lost, but just hiding. The camera negative was discovered in the Columbia Pictures collection at the Library of Congress, and a 4K restoration was performed by Sony Pictures, with funding provided by the Film Foundation (I viewed the restoration at MoMA earlier this year). Her Man is a redemptive romance that takes place in one of the scummiest bars in Havana: the Thalia. There Garnett winds his camera through a knockabout group of con artists, drunks and killers to get to his dewy-eyed lovers, who strong-arm their way out the door.

The Heroic Trio (1993), directed by Johnnie To

A deliriously entertaining Hong Kong superhero movie starring the unbeatable trio of Anita Mui, Michelle Yeoh, and Maggie Cheung. I went to see a battered but beautiful print at the Metrograph in NYC, and was whisked away by the elegant wirework fight scenes and breathless plot mechanics that mashes up kung fu/comic book/horror tropes. Anita Mui is Wonder Woman (no relation), intent on breaking the nefarious baby stealing underworld demon king known only as Evil Master. She is reluctantly joined by fast talking mercenary Chat (aka Thief Catcher – Maggie Cheung) and Ching (Michelle Yeoh), who has access to an invisibility robe (it’s a long story). The three actresses slice through the film with grace and aplomb, but Cheung is the acid-tongued standout – introduced flying over the police’s heads on a motorcycle, and then riding a dynamited barrel into a hostage situation. It’s a well-carpentered, ever surprising entertainment that I’d take over any of the Marvel movies thus far.

In Vanda’s Room (2001)

The second film in Pedro Costa’s Fontainhas Trilogy, three remarkable features that depict the everyday life of a slum in Lisbon. Vanda Duarte, who portrayed one of the maids in Ossos, becomes the central character here, playing herself as she and her friends smoke heroin, play cards and gossip. The destruction and relocation of Fontainhas’ residents had already begun, so half the neighborhood is rubble. With the shift to digital Costa experiments in recording in very low light and extremely long takes. He is able to shape hieratic, exalted images with these limited means, turning Vanda and her friends into saints. Whether Vanda is snorting H, hacking up a cough or napping, the waver and hum of the blacks as they buffet her angelic face lend the images a religious intensity. Available to view on the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck.

Men Don’t Leave (1990)

Paul Brickman took seven years to make his follow-up to Risky Business, and Men Don’t Leave is a finely tuned family melodrama about the loss of a husband and father – and the aftershocks of grief. But it failed to find an audience and swiftly disappeared from view. Brickman has not directed a feature since. Men Don’t Leave, now streaming on FilmStruck, should have been the start of the next phase of his career instead of an abrupt end. It is a film of empathy and grace, led by a thorny performance by Jessica Lange as a widowed, exhausted single mother trying to raise two kids and make ends meet.

My Little Loves (1974), directed by Jean Eustache

Jean Eustache’s My Little Loves (1974) is about a boy. Twelve-year-old Daniel climbs trees, flirts with girls and punches classmates in the stomach. He is poised between youth and adolescence, and the film seeks to capture all the moments, and all the silences, of this befuddling transition. After Eustache’s coruscating The Mother and the Whore (1973), a logorrheic portrait of post-May ’68 despair, My Little Loves seems startlingly quiet and gentle. But each are after a kind of completism, of leaving nothing out. Discussing My Little Loves, Eustache told his fellow filmmaker, and Cahiers du Cinema habitue, Luc Moullet, that he wanted “to reconstruct [my] childhood: every wall section, every tree, every light pole.” With the help of cinematographer Nestor Almendros, All My Loves becomes a sensorial memory object. There isn’t much of a narrative – it drifts – but it builds up the fabric and texture of Eustache’s childhood in the small rural town of Pessac (outside of Bordeaux), and the industrial city of Narbonnes, on the Mediterranean coast.

Placido (1961), directed by Luis Garcia Berlanga

Placido (1961) takes place over the course of one chaotic Christmas Eve night as a provincial Spanish town desperately tries to prove its Christian charity. It is a ferociously funny black comedy about performative morality, in which the homeless are used as props to stroke the middle classes’ ego. It is directed by Luis Garcia Berlanga (The Executioner) with intricately orchestrated long takes in which a chorus of self-serving characters negotiate the social corridors of Franco’s Spain. With its rhythmic rapid-fire dialogue and cutting use of caricature, it reminded me most of Preston Sturges (and the small town misunderstandings of The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek [1944]). Placido is now streaming on The Criterion Channel of FilmStruck, along with four other Berlanga features.

A Summer’s Tale (1996), directed by Eric Rohmer

Like all of Eric Rohmer’s summer vacation films, it is about hesitation and uncertainty, the holidays a transient borderland before the return to adulthood, when decisions have to be made. A Summer’s Tale involves a moody engineering student and hopeful musician named Gaspard who is romantically entangled with three women on the beach. He is entranced by the idea of love but is rather afraid of the physical reality, and masters the art of the indeterminate reply, a master of escape. One of Rohmer’s few male protagonists (the film often feels like a throwback to the masculine bull sessions of the Moral Tales), Gaspard is reported to be a highly autobiographical character who runs through a composite of events from the director’s life. Rohmer doesn’t look back with nostalgia, but with a lucid gimlet eye, his Gaspard one of high ideals and evasive, indecisive actions. A Summer’s Tale is streaming on Netflix, and is available on DVD from Big World Pictures.

Too Late For Tears (1949), directed by Byron Haskin

After viewing Too Late For Tears (1949), I would advise all couples against accepting cash-stuffed valises of mysterious origin. Sure, it would be nice to be raised up out of your dead-end middle-class marriage, but there is the whole issue of the money’s origin, and the pile-up of bodies that keeping the cash may entail. Too Late For Tears is a vicious little film noir with a flinty, sociopathic performance by Lizabeth Scott, but it had been in public domain purgatory for decades, circulating in muddy transfers under its re-release title Killer Bait. The Film Noir Foundation has lobbied for its restoration for years, and with the help of a Hollywood Foreign Press grant, the UCLA Film and Television Archive was able to reconstruct the film from a 35mm nitrate French dupe negative, a 35mm acetate re-issue print, and a 16mm acetate. The result can be seen in a superb new Blu-ray from Flicker Alley.

March 15, 2016

Jean Eustache’s My Little Loves (Mes petites amoureuses, 1974) is about a boy. Twelve-year-old Daniel climbs trees, flirts with girls, and punches classmates in the stomach. He is poised between youth and adolescence, and the film seeks to capture all the moments, and all the silences, of this befuddling transition. After Eustache’s coruscating The Mother and the Whore (1973), a logorrheic portrait of post-May ’68 despair, My Little Loves seems startlingly quiet and gentle. But each are after a kind of completism, of leaving nothing out. Discussing My Little Loves, Eustache told his fellow filmmaker, and Cahiers du Cinema habitue, Luc Moullet, that he wanted “to reconstruct [my] childhood: every wall section, every tree, every light pole.” With the help of cinematographer Nestor Almendros, All My Loves becomes a sensorial memory object. There isn’t much of a narrative – it drifts – but it builds up the fabric and texture of Eustache’s childhood in the small rural town of Pessac (outside of Bordeaux), and the industrial city of Narbonnes, on the Mediterranean coast. My Little Loves is screening on 35mm in the Metrograph’s Jean Eustache series, one of the inaugural programs for this ambitious new theater on NYC’s Lower East Side.

Eustache had long wanted to make My Little Loves, but it was only after the relative success of The Mother and the Whore (which won the Grand Jury prize at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival), that he was able to secure funding. The film follows the loose outline of Eustache’s own youth: Daniel (Martin Loeb) begins the film living with his grandmother (Jacqueline Dufranne) in Pessac. His days unwind over long country roads, where he shoots cap guns at girls who ignore him, and at school, where he punches the tallest, and meekest, kid in class, just because he can. Then Daniel’s mother (Ingrid Caven) floats into town with her sullen new Spanish lover José (Dionys Mascolo). She is going to take him to Narbonnes, a gritty industrial town in which Daniel will be pulled from school and given a job as a handyman’s assistant. The wide open spaces of Pessac become cramped alleyways, and Daniel escapes into cinema and girl chasing with the layabouts at the nearby cafe. Pessac is a promise that is not kept, and My Little Loves is about Daniel adapting to his own solitude.

Moullet wrote in Film Comment that, “Grandparents played an important role in the lives of many French filmmakers during this period. The generation born in the Twenties often sent their children to the countryside to live with their grandparents: this allowed the children to be better fed during the German Occupation, and the parents to enjoy life immediately after the war. The result was a reverence for grandparents and a rejection of the father and mother – a crisis that fertilized a number of artistic careers.” As in the film, Eustache was born in 1938 in Pessac, raised by his grandmother, and moved to Narbonnes with his mother when he was around 12-years-old. The grandmother in the film is presented as a figure of love and light, indulgent and comforting. Sunlight streams through her rural home, one which is kept clean and precise with fastidious care. Daniel, feeling safe in this care, begins to push the boundaries of his childhood. His playfulness is getting ever more violent. Martin Loeb’s performance as Daniel is one of uncanny calm, his wide-set eyes surveying the scene. But even though we are given some of his thoughts in voice-over, they are always ambivalent or self-mortifying. He is as uncertain about his true self as we are – so we just look alongside him at his childhood haunts: there is a the perfect climbing tree in an isolated field, or the bustling market in the square with one precious ice cream vendor.

His mother comes to usher him out of this childhood reverie and into the harsh reality of his situation. As Eustache did, Daniel comes from a working class family, and his mother has hit hard times. His father is missing (or dead), and she is scrounging up money doing odd sewing jobs. José is a manual laborer in seasonal farm work, seeming too tired to speak. Daniel moves into their cramped one bedroom apartment, sleeping on a mat on the floor. He cannot attend school because his mom cannot afford the textbooks. The wallpaper is curled and the smell of mildew emanates off the screen. They are too busy working to take notice of him, so Daniel takes refuge in the streets and in the cinemas – places where you can be alone in groups. He sits in the balcony for the rapturously romantic Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, a makeout spot for idle teens eager to work out their tongues. His other bad influence are the layabouts at his neighborhood cafe, including one slickly rich dick who carries 5,000 francs on him at all times in a leather satchel, enough for two “peppermint jet” drinks a day and for wooing random girls who pass by.

If he’s not at the movies or slouching at the cafe, he’s at work tinkering with motor bikes at a repair shop operated by José’s brother. Daniel is paying some kind of family debt he is never privy to, working as a virtual servant for little to no pay, all for the pleasure of put downs by the owner and his friends, including a cameo by Maurice Pialat (a similarly dyspeptic director – read Nick Pinkerton on “The Second New Wave” at Metrograph’s lovely site for more on their relationship), who weeps for the immature, uneducated youth of the day. For the most part Eustache and Almendros keep the camera unobtrusive, letting the locations and the actors tell their story – but occasionally they are enraptured by faces. There are two bravura sequences that slow down Eustache’s process of remembrance, as if he is stopping and savoring these pockets of time. One is a slow dolly of the cafe, rolling past the bored, antsy, dissolute young men waiting for the day to pass or an event to happen (there is usually a dance, or a party, or a pinball game). The later, more extended one happens at a performance of a girls’ choir, which Daniel happens to stumble into on a lazy afternoon. Eustache pans past the faces of the choir, and their faces encompass the world: there is irony, joy, boredom, studiousness, and passion. Though Eustache obsessively details this moment, Daniel can only see the girl to his right, and the opportunity to briefly caress female flesh. His mind has been taken over with lust, and it is pursued with religious intensity (early in the film, Daniel presses himself up against a girl during his Communion procession). The final sequences find Daniel back home in Pessac, on vacation. His old friends are still kids, while Daniel has aged irrevocably into adolescence. This is a loss that cannot be recovered, and Eustache renders it with eloquent, bone-deep sadness.

Tag: My Little Loves

KID STUFF: MY LITTLE LOVES (1974)