the duchess of langeais Tagged Articles at Cinematical

In describing today's best directors, three terms are generally used (and overused): Maverick, Genius and Auteur. A "maverick" is now used to describe virtually anyone who makes a movie without using Hollywood money. An "auteur" is used to describe anyone who writes as well as directs. And "genius" is used to describe anyone who makes a halfway decent film. I'm taking these words back. In reality, a "maverick" should be a button-pusher. It's a filmmaker who is so radical and daring that even high-minded, forward-thinking critics sneer at their work, people like Vincent Gallo or Catherine Breillat. These people are so dangerous that they have trouble making and distributing films. Harmony Korine, director of Mister Lonely (5 screens) is very much a maverick. Korine has pushed many buttons and many envelopes over the years and though I love his work, he's someone I wouldn't want to invite to my house. (He scares me.)

Werner Herzog, director of Encounters at the End of the World (1 screen), is also a maverick (and, incidentally, a buddy of Korine's). His physically dangerous films have probably had insurance companies slamming the door in his face, and his co-workers have included people who might not be fit for polite society. (At the very least, most of them would turn heads.) Some of his actors have reportedly threatened to kill him. It cracks me up that, because Herzog's documentary Grizzly Man was such a hit, Herzog was allowed to make his new film for the Discovery Channel. I'd really love to have been in on that board meeting. Did they really know who they were dealing with? At the same time, Herzog is also an auteur: all of his films have the same roaming curiosity, fearlessly exploring man's tenuous connection to nature, from Aguirre navigating the Amazon looking for El Dorado, to Timothy Treadwell seeking to befriend the bears.

Four of the most exciting movie stars in the world are currently appearing in two of the least interesting new movies, taking a back seat to less interesting stars. Jackie Chan and Jet Li are master martial artists, Chan with a comedian's touch and Li with an appealing stoic quality. They team up for the first time in The Forbidden Kingdom (105 screens), a movie about a white kid and his attempt to beat up some bullies. Chow Yun-fat and Michelle Yeoh team up for the second time in The Children of Huang Shi (43 screens), about a British journalist (not played by Chow) and an Australian nurse (not played by Yeoh) saving some orphans.

Chow had a suave, cool quality that could have turned him into the next James Bond or Cary Grant, and Yeoh is a beautiful martial artist who could have become a groundbreaking feminist action star. It's a sad state of affairs, but I guess these films are the final proof of the cold, dead corpse of the Hong Kong New Wave.

Like a collector of stray dogs, I have likewise assembled my personal canon of misfit filmmakers, artists who have fallen out of fashion or just never caught on. Jacques Rivette, whose new The Duchess of Langeais (6 screens) is currently struggling in art house theaters, is a prime example. According to his bio on the IMDB, he has always nestled in an uncomfortable place between film snobs and film populists. His films are too playful for intellectuals and yet too severe for mainstream consumption. He was a critic at Cahiers du Cinema alongside Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol (some of his writing has been translated to English; I especially love his piece on Howard Hawks and the 1952 film Monkey Business) yet his work does not seem like that of a film buff; it springs more from literature and from his own temperament. Indeed, he's very hard to pin down, perhaps partially because hardly anyone has seen very many of his films. His 12-1/2 hour film Out 1 (1972), which has been called his greatest achievement, has screened in America so few times that probably less than a thousand people have seen it.

Faced with the prospect of checking out several new releases or luxuriating in a new print of Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt, audiences overwhelmingly chose Godard's 1963 classic. Playing at a single location (Film Forum in New York City), Contempt earned $13,100 over the weekend, according to estimates compiled by Leonard Klady of Movie City News. Distributor Rialto Pictures has the film booked at Film Forum until March 27, and then perhaps will tour the print, though no details are provided on their site.

Indie holdovers also did better than the newest offerings. David Gordon Green's Snow Angels (Warner Independent) made $8,666 per screen at three theaters in its second week out, per Box Office Mojo, while Oscar winner The Counterfeiters (Sony Pictures Classics) pulled in $6,263 per-screen at 72 locations in its fourth week. Ira Sachs' Married Life (Sony Pictures Classics), Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park (IFC) and Jacques Rivette's The Duchess of Langeais (IFC) also performed well; the first two in their second week of release, and the latter in its fourth week.

Michael Haneke's remake of his own Funny Games (Warner Independent) did very little business, grabbing just $1,800 per screen at 289 engagements, which is disappointing since our own James Rocchi called it "a great film ... it's hard to say which Funny Games stirs up more -- your guts, or your brain." Meanwhile, Bill Maher's Sleepwalking (Overture) was right behind at $1,640 per screen at 30 locations. In the review by Cinematical's Jeffrey M. Anderson, he concluded: "Worst of all is that title, which is exactly the kind of title that filmmakers should stay away from if they want to avoid a fairly obvious one-word film review."

Okay. It's time to get down to brass tacks. I'm going to get up on my soapbox and hope that the right Academy members read the column this week, because it's time to re-do the rules of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar category. Do you know how long it has been since a great film, a truly great film, won in this category? I'm talking about a film made by a genuinely great artist of the cinema, a film for the ages, and not just a perfectly good film, or a film about one of the great world wars. Here's your answer: twenty-five years ago. Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander (1983) was the last great one. That leaves 25 years of pretty good, just OK, forgettable, or flat-out awful winners (mostly forgettable). This year's winner, The Counterfeiters (41 screens) had to be one of the worst movies I saw all year; at it's center is a perfectly good (true) WWII concentration camp story, but it's warped by an entirely inept director, responsible for one of the worst movies I've ever seen, All the Queen's Men (2001). How did it win? How did it get past all the truly great films of 2007?

In a quiet post-Oscar week, Austria's The Counterfeiters (Sony Pictures Classics), winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, kept its position at the top of the charts, earning $10,050 per screen at 18 locations, according to estimates compiled by Leonard Klady at Movie City News. Klady noted that the film "doubled its playdates and box office but appears short of the commercial traction (or social vibrancy) of last year's triumphant The Lives of Others."

Chop Shop (Koch Lorber) performed very nicely at its single-theater engagement in New York City's Film Forum, grossing $8,900. Kim Voynar described it as one of her favorite films from last year's festival circuit; filmmaker Ramin Bahrani (Man Push Cart) follows a 12-year-old orphan struggling to survive on the mean streets of New York. Chop Shop continues its run at Film Forum through March 11.

Other new indie releases struggled to find audiences. Chicago 10 (Roadside Attractions), "appreciable as one of the most creative and entertaining documentary films in years," did the best, pulling in $3,030 per-screen at 14 locations. Playing on 75 screens, City of Men (Miramax), "neither as stylistically fresh nor as powerfully raw as City of God," scratched out $1,570 per engagement, while Bonneville (SenArts), "a road trip movie for spunky older chicks" starring Kathy Bates, Joan Allen and Jessica Lange, and Romulus, My Father (Magnolia Pictures), "an incredibly slow-paced film that relies on the strength of its actors to thrive" starring Eric Bana, trailed behind, earning $1,410 and $1,070 per screen, respectively, in limited engagements.

Analyzing the weekend box office returns, Leonard Klady of Movie City News saw "no great Oscar box office surge," though No Country for Old Men enjoyed an upward swing; based on his estimates, Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar winner The Counterfeiters (Sony Pictures Classics) topped the indie charts. Hailing from Austria, The Counterfeiters tells "one of the most interesting stories to come out of World War II," wrote Christopher Campbell, though he felt it was "not quite a great film." The Counterfeiters averaged $12,330 per-screen at the seven locations where it played.

French master Jacques Rivette's latest, The Duchess of Langeais (IFC Films) struck Ryan Stewart as similar to La Vie en Rose "in that it works just well enough to support a dynamic performance but contains too many structural oddities, fights too many directorial idiosyncracies and stifles its own momentum too much to succeed on the whole." Rivette's fans came out at both theaters where it opened, averaging $11,250 per screen, according to Box Office Mojo.

79 year-old French New Wave master Jacques Rivette once directed a film called Out1 that clocked in at just under thirteen hours, but The Duchess of Langeais, his latest film which plays at a traditional feature length, comes across at times like one of those marathon efforts. Slow-moving to the point of stillness and comprised of an unremarkable succession of master shots that bespeak a director focused entirely on the performances and totally unbothered by cinematography, the film's only salvation is a remarkably graceful turn by Jeanne Balibar as the titular duchess -- a coy aristrocrat in Restoration France called Antoinette who alleviates her boredom with life by playing love games with Armand, a young Naval officer played here by Guillaume Depardieu, son of Gerard. Game is the operative word, because what they engage in over the course of the film is not a genuine passion but a kind of unhealthy mutual fascination that mostly revolves around her superior social position in French society and the ways in which it may frustrate his romantic intentions.

Based on Balzac's 1834 novel, the film begins with a late scene in which Armand encounters his other half in a Carmelite nunnery long after their affair has gone cold. Using his pull as an officer, he gains access to the convent and tries to broker some time alone with Antoinette, but there's very little useful information exchanged between the two of them before she interrupts the proceedings by screamingly confessing to her mother superior that the man in question is a former lover, which breaks everything up immediately. The film then jumps back to the very beginning, at the moment of the first encounter during a ball. This, it turns out, will be something of a running theme, with Armand almost pathologically unable to articulate his feelings -- if he has genuine feelings, something of a question -- and constrained by values of his own. It's those values that the film needs to shine a stark light on in order to understand Armand's later actions -- leaving the film, audiences may know little more about his motivations than when they entered the theater.