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Criterion / 1949-2000 / 1048 Minutes / Unrated / Street Date: October 28, 2008
Giant Criterion box sets like these are implicitly a mixed bag. I don’t mean that the qualities of the films are in question; you’d struggle to find a more varied and intriguing mix of internationally-acclaimed films than this one. But part of the delicacy of Criterion releases are bonus features, and sets like 10 Years of Rialto Pictures and its Essential Art House set from a few years ago end up abandoning the comprehensive double-disc editions of films for sleek, simple, movie-only versions.
With that in mind, big, beautiful box sets like this one end up being far more for newcomers than already-versed cinephiles. Only one of these ten films hasn’t been previously released by Criterion on DVD, Murderous Maids. So it’s without reservation that this writer recommends the individual releases of all the pictures in this set. Yet it’s hard to hold any grudges when the makeup of this 10 Years of Rialto Pictures edition is so wonderfully multifaceted.
We start with Army of Shadows, Jean-Pierre Melville’s marvelously intriguing French Resistance drama. Lino Ventura plays Philippe, a civil engineer who is also a high ranking member of the Resistance. When we meet him, he’s been betrayed and is on his way to a POW camp. Eventually he escapes and rejoins his team, which includes Jean Francois (Jean-Pierre Cassel) and Mathilde (Simone Signoret), considered the most brilliant of all the agents. While all this has the makings of a spy thriller, Melville takes the opposite tack. After a brief submarine trip to London, Philippe parachutes back into France. Had this been a typical spy movie, Philippe would be fighting off a gaggle of Nazis. Later in the film, Philippe and a coterie of Resistance fighters face a hail of machinegun fire. Had this been a Bourne film, the excitement would have been unbearable. But the way Melville plays it, the tension is unbearable, not the excitement. There’s nothing that smacks of superspy exploits. When Philippe’s betrayer is executed, there is nothing joyous about it. In fact, they have to figure out how to kill him because nobody wants to use his gun; that will make too much noise.
The movie is about spies and resistance and war, but it’s also about people compelled to methodical acts of bravery to save their country even though there’s no chance of recognition from the outside world. They’re not trying to avoid death. In a sense, they’re already dead, delaying the inevitable long enough to prove to God that Man isn’t a lost cause.
Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar is a far more cerebral, introspective affair, yet it’s still regarded as one of the grandest French-language films ever made. Bresson, with his feather-light directorial touch, wants to paint the miraculous tendencies of everyday life in such a stripped-down fashion that viewers have no choice but to see the glory in the minutiae of the status quo existence of his chracters.
The film has many facets - the booklet that accompanies this superb Criterion Collection release addresses the Catholic references in the film - but Bresson refuses to make anything simple for his audience. As Balthazar rambles through its first hour, those unfamiliar with Bresson's breezy storytelling style may scratch their heads in frustration, wondering where the hell this thing is going.
What's liberating about Au Hasard Balthazar structurally is that it meanders through its narrative not with scenes, but with juxtaposing images and ideas posing as scenes. We see a sick girl crying in her bed; then we cut suddenly and see her a few minutes later, deader than a doornail. We see young lovers whispering each others' names with romantic abandon, but we never see them interact in any kind of didactic fashion.
Bresson gives the impression with Au Hasard Balthazar that the dialogue and pretense of normal life is a given. Lovers will talk about their love, then fight about it, then make up afterward (boring), so there's no reason to showcase it. It's atypical filmmaking, so those who prefer their viewing experiences with an appropriate amount of hearts, ribbons, and flowers will find keeping up with Au Hasard Balthazar too heady of a task. More adventurous cinephiles just might agree with Jean-Luc Godard, who called Balthazar “the world in an hour and a half.”
Then we come to Band of Outsiders. On its most basic level, the film is about a heist involving two extremely petty criminals: Franz (a terrific Sami Frey) and Arthur (Claude Brasseur). In their English class they meet Odile (Anna Karina, who was Godard's wife at the time), a delicious number with her plaid skirt and schoolgirl charm. At first, Odile falls for Arthur, the slicker, more sinister of the two. He discovers that Odile lives with her mother and a wealthy border, who has a rather large sum of cash in his room. The threesome decides to break into the house, steal the money, and run away forever. Of course, since this is a Godard film, the characters, the plot, and the ultimate outcome are not entirely the point. It's the spaces between the characters, the plot, and the ultimate outcome where Godard lives.
As usual, all the experimental, fourth wall nuggets you expect from Jean-Luc Godard are here. The great director himself narrates the film, including an offer to sum up the plot "for latecomers arriving now." At another point, Franz, Arthur, and Odile sit in a cafe and wonder what would happen if no one talked for one minute. Subsequently, not only do the three characters stay quiet, but Godard also kills the ambient audio, meaning there is zero sound of any kind for about 40 seconds. There is also a moment where our heroes pass under a sign that reads "Nouvelle Vague," which is French for New Wave.
But really, the most vivid character in the film is Paris itself. Raoul Coutard's black and white cinematography is cold and otherworldly. As if our anti-heroes live in a Paris just parallel to the real one, but constructed so Godard can say his peace about the state of cinema and his place in it. Band of Outsiders deserves to remembered, cherished and imitated.
Billy Liar, one of the more celebrated works from director John Schlesinger, is an entertaining comedy about the life of Billy Fisher (the inimitable Tom Courtenay), a young lad overwhelmed by dreams of becoming something, even if he doesn't exactly know what that is. As a defense against failure, he has become a compulsive liar and a daydreamer, longing to break out from his dreary suburban lifestyle. Fisher becomes more and more entangled in a web of lies. He lies to his parents about his job, he lies to his boss about future employment and missing funds, and he lies to two girlfriends, Rita (Gwendolyn Watts) and Barbara (Helen Fraser), all the while longing for Liz (Julie Christie), who represents the freedom he pines for.
While the main story is set in the real world that is Billy's dreary reality, he is frequently transported to the magical realms within in his own mind. As Fisher attempts to maintain his web of lies, the line between the reality and fantasy becomes more fragile, resulting in more elaborate lies, which will eventually destroy what little self-esteem Billy originally had. This would be a hilarious comedy if Fisher were not such a tragic character, so ultimately the charms in Billy Liar are bittersweet indeed.
We then encounter the breezy, Mensa-smart narrative circus of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, one of master director Luis Bunuel’s finest and most symbolically dense pictures. The set up is Beckett-like in scope (a group of six rich folks sit down for dinner, but never eat), but the material that Bunuel is able to mine from their labyrinthine conversations has yet to be matched in modern cinema. The film may lack the epic, ferris-wheel fireworks of the director’s more iconic works (Un Chien Andalou, L’age d’Or), but The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is arguably the grandest achievement in the latter part of the filmmaker’s career. It’s cheeky, irreverent, questioning, deliciously satiric, and best of all, one is always rewarded with something new every time it’s viewed.
Mafioso is Italian director Alberto Lattuada’s finest hour (in addition to his collaboration with Federico Fellini on Variety Lights). It’s the kind of complicated culture study that went underappreciated at the time of its release yet maintains a sturdy level of insight and verisimilitude in hindsight. The concept of the film is simple. Milanese car factory worker Antonio Badalamenti (Alberto Sordi) decides to take his family on a visit to his homeland of Sicily in an attempt to return to his roots and give his children a connection with a heritage sorely lacking in an industrial society. But as funny as the film is, things are not all smooth in the Badalamenti family’s Sicilian countryside. The traditionalist old-timers don’t take kindly to the sort of city folk that their distant relative have become, and Badalamenti isn’t quite ready to accept that there are certain aspects to the “family business” that he isn’t quite ready to share with his wife and kids (hence the title).
Yet despite these serious themes, Mafioso is neither heavy-handed nor one-note. What Lattuada Badalamenti does so well with his material is counterpoint everything with contrasting moods and dialogue. One could make the argument that this is a mafia comedy (of sorts) in that it attempts to undermine the severity of the proto-mafia portrayed with a humorous undercurrent. Lattuada seems to be insisting that his characters need not fear the violent business at their extended family’s core, but rather recognize its boundaries and implications so they can figure out how to exist in a world alongside it.
And as Badalamenti inevitably gets entwined with some “businessmen” in Sicily, the film takes its time in the third act to really address this. Badalamenti is forced to see firsthand just what certain members of his family do. And Lattuada pours subversive ideas onto his viewers about how the mafia will always be a part of Italian history, though the plight of mid-century Italian modernists was to marginalize the entity as much as possible.
I’m sure I’m not doing justice to the film’s multiple thematic layers, so I suppose I should keep it simple and just say that while Mafioso may not be a classic in every sense of the word, it’s far nobler for what it undertakes narratively than what it accomplishes on film. The wild and dynamic ideas portrayed within its semi-comic rhetoric showcase a filmmaker working at the height of his powers.
So what if Lattuada will be more widely known as the guy who gave Fellini his first job? As long as cinephiles have Mafioso to fall back on, he’ll still be recognized as a driving force of Italian cinema in the ‘50s and ‘60s.
Murderous Maids (a new addition to the Criterion pantheon) does not have the sheen of age and has not earned as much appreciation as the other films in this set. It was made in 2000 and is the most recently-released movie of the group. But it nevertheless is a film that has a slick narrative and is scandalously entertaining. The movie follows Christine (Sylvie Testud), an out-of-control young girl in a Catholic school, who is constantly getting fired because of her aggressive, off-putting sensibilities. It seems that all she wants to do is work alongside her sister, Lea (Julie-Marie Parmentier), a woman Christine loves in more ways than one.
In fact, when the two get work from a nasty old coot named Madame Lincelan (Dominique Labourier), the nosy matron intrudes on the sisters as they are exploring an incestuous side of their relationship (quel scandal!) and the merde hits the fan. Based on a real-life account of the murdering Papin sisters, Murderous Maids is far more graphic and sexually-charged than other pictures in this box set, but its storytelling techniques are appropriately old-fashioned. Director Jean-Pierre Denis doesn’t frame the film as lesbian soft-core porn, but instead maintains a stoic, steady directorial hand as his story careens toward an explosive close. It’s a helluva ride.
Rififi is one of the best bank heist movies ever made, and one of director Jules Dassin’s greatest achievements. Tony le Stephanois (Jean Servais) gets out of the big house after having served ten years to protect the younger Jo. Tony is old and not in the greatest health. To add to his problems, he’s poor, a situation exacerbated by his lousy luck at the poker table. Jo informs his elder friend about an opportunity to do a "window job" at a local bank, but Tony wants no part of it; he has no desire to return to prison. But then Tony discovers that his old girlfriend, who betrayed him, is in town, so he sets off to find her. And find her he does; the encounter leaves her scarred in more ways than one. The confrontation leaves Tony with renewed vigor. Not content with the plans Jo had previously laid out, Tony ambitiously informs his confidants that he want to go after a bigger fish: the bank's safe.
It might be impossible to fully appreciate this film today due to the numerous copycats and derivatives that followed in its wake. Even Scorsese might owe something to this film, since his Goodfellas employed a very similar plot device (if you’ve seen both films you’ll know exactly what I mean). And not to be forgotten are all the bank heist films that came after this seminal bank heist film. Rififi demonstrates that perfection in execution is far less important than excellence in planning.
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