By David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh
each Friday.
APPETIZER: Reviews of Faces
Places and The Foreigner
Faces Places
Though
film-struck, I was too youthfully ignorant of French cinema in 1955 to know
about Agnès Varda making her first movie. Her latest, Faces Places, was filmed at age 88. Varda has probably toppled eternally
controversial Leni Riefenstahl (Hitler’s choice!) as the greatest female
director. Nominate Jane Campion, Agnieszka Holland or Chantal Akerman, and
you’d better make a fantastic case.
Faces Places is a road-tripper like Varda’s The Gleaners and I, another loosely built documentary essay. Her compelling
partner is the roving photo-site artist called JR, then aged 33. The tall
hipster, a former tagger, wears dark glasses (Agnès keeps urging him to remove
them) and has a terrific eye. They first met on Paris’s Rue Daguerre (long ago
the locale of Varda’s Daguerrotypes).
Delighted by the tiny, round auteur, JR invites her to hit the roads in his van,
which is made to look like a camera. With it he creates, often first using a
28mm. wide-angle lens, black-and-white portraits of people he finds. Like
Varda he is a humorous gleaner of life and humanity.
JR “blows
up” many pictures, expanded for sectional pasting onto buildings, trains, ruins.
These visions confer a local fame closer to Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland than
Orwell’s Big Brother. A shy villager feels conflicted about her wall-sized celebrity,
while a wry down-and-outer is bemused and thrilled by his elevation from obscurity.
The stimulating talk of Agnès and JR adds Gallic sauce to their trip, as they
ponder art, age and film. Two splendid creations rise near waves. In one, a
snap that Agnès took in youth, of her late friend the photographer Guy Bourdin,
is JR’d onto a fallen German bunker on a Norman beach. The other lofts epic
snaps of three women onto stacked cargo containers in Le Havre (they’re among
the port’s few female harbor workers). One episode spills open love, time, loss,
transience, while the other is a towering feminist statement.
Like
other New Wave talents, even Truffaut, Resnais and Varda’s beloved husband
Jacques Demy, Varda was always crowded by the cerebral éclat of Jean-Luc
Godard. There is a clip of young Godard with her, and a fond, merry salute to
his Bande à part (Band of Outsiders, 1964). Agnès chose to
end with a Godardian topper, which proved to be less than the celebration she wanted.
But the finish is still a touché. Varda remains triumphant, the great surviving
surfer of the New Wave.
The Foreigner
One
asset of The Foreigner, a strong
action movie, is that Jackie Chan at 63 uses his age well. At least his face
does, as Chan sustains the battered, angry grief of a man who has lost his
daughter in a London terrorist bombing. This being a Chan film, we know that
the body will out-perform the face. The moves are less flamboyant now, and may have
stunt support, but Chan is in charge. He plays a London restauranteur with a
covert military past (Vietnam and beyond), and he goes on the revenge path
against a viciously rogue I.R.A. unit that detonated the bomb (as for more
current evil, there is one mention of Isis and Al-Qaeda).
Despite
his Vietnamese name our hero is Chinese, even gets called “the Chinaman” (I
thought the term faded with Charlie Chan and chop suey). The source is Stephen
Leather’s novel The Chinaman, a title
that must still be PC in Britain. Giving old, Bronson-trashed action clichés some
fresh zest is director Martin Campbell, a proven wiz with mayhem, suspense, torture,
the whole kit. The action in Belfast and London is grimly exciting, though it
does seem that both cities are mainly platforms for surveillance cameras.
Jackie’s fists and tricks, leaps and traps will, of course, lay high-tech low.
In
essence The Foreigner is a duel of two
aging men. The acting edge belongs not to Chan, for all his grizzled-cherubic
intensity, but to nemesis Pierce Brosnan. As a former I.R.A. war chief turned
into a peace-pious politician, while playing his own dirty game, Brosnan (Irish-born,
now 64) swings a St. Pat’s Irish accent like an emerald flame thrower. He
schemes, simmers and unleashes profane, Piercing
rages. It’s a show in itself, and more than makes up for Brosnan’s singing in Mamma Mia!
SALAD (A List)
Twelve Other Important Agnès Varda
Movies:
La Pointe Corte (1956), Cleo
From 5 to 7 (1962), Salut les Cubains
(1963), Le Bonheur (1965), Lions Love (and Lies) 1969, Daguerrotypes (1976), One Sings the Other Doesn’t (1977), Murs Murs (1981), Vagabond (1985), Jacquot de
Nantes (1991), 101 Nights (1995),
The World of Jacques Demy (1995), The Gleaners and I (2000).
WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Orson
Welles: “The camera is much more than a recording apparatus. It is a medium via
which messages reach us from another world, a world that is not ours, that
brings us to the heart of the great secret. Here magic begins. A film is a
ribbon of dreams.” (From Peter Cowie’s The
Cinema of Orson Welles.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
“And
then – shazaam! – a shining key plops
into the dirty water. Diane places it in the trash, but later finds her nerve
and presses the buzzer of her new neighbor: ‘Are you washing a dog?’ (Lionel:
‘Excuse me?’) ‘Your dog’s hair is in my pipe.’ (Lionel: ‘Perhaps you should
check out the basement’). In 2015 some of us chuckled when Kidman, in Paddington, spoke of ‘drains clogged
with hair.” (From the Nicole Kidman/Fur:
An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, obtainable
from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
Lily
Tomlin, Art Carney and Bill Macy wash a lot of noir laundry in The Late Show (Warner Bros. 1977;
director Robert Benton, cinematographer Charles Rosher Jr.)
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