Lola is a cabaret dancer living in Nantes, and she’s the centre of both the film and the affections of the three male leads. There’s Roland, a layabout and a dreamer who loved Lola as a teenager. Then there’s Frankie, an American sailor who has struck up a relationship with her on his travels through France. Finally there is Michel, the absent father of Lola’s child who disappeared seven years back.
It’s the film’s self-consciousness that turns this story of first loves into something more interesting than the by-numbers fluff that a brief outlining of the setup might suggest – it’s a fantasyland full of people that are dreaming of playing their life out as though it’s a romantic Hollywood movie, and this counteracts movingly with the disappointments of their everyday existence. It’s what gives the film’s cute finale some weight. It’s as though Lola has forced her way into a movie screen to make things turn out happy ever after.
The main joys come from the interactions between the characters, how their paths cross (or don’t), how connections and inversions reveal themselves as the plot unfolds, how their dreams and remembrances rhyme. A wired network is created that really lights up if you give in to its charms.
The way it’s all wrapped up is pretty seductive too. Jacques Demy’s gliding, graceful direction is a perfect partner to Raoul Coutard’s gorgeous cinematography, and backed up by Michel Legrand’s greasy, romantic score it makes for completely hypnotic viewing.
Although the plot and its characters are cut out of some very familiar cloth, Lola lights up the screen, it glistens and it sparkles and it’s thrillingly alive.
Friday, April 18, 2008
Lola (Demy)
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
The Bicycle Thieves (De Sica)
I’m not versed at all in the Italian neorealism movement and haven’t seen any films by De Sica, Rossellini or Visconti. It’s a huge gap that I’ve wanted to go about filling for a long time, so last night I checked out Vittoria De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, a film that tends to be regarded not only as one of the pinnacles of the movement, but cinema itself.
Here’s the basics: Antonio Ricci is an unemployed man living in Rome who’s given a job as a bill poster. He needs a bike for the job, so to make some money he has to pawn his and his wife’s bed sheets. Then he and his son Bruno set off to work. It doesn’t take long before his bike gets stolen, and so begins Antonio and Bruno’s journey to retrieve the bike, a journey that takes them all over the city, meeting all sorts of inhabitants: thieves, beggars, the unemployed. By the film’s end, broken, dejected and desperate to keep hold of his job, Antonio attempts to steal a bike himself.
I’ll quickly get the hysterics out of the way and say that I found this film to be one of the most involving, intensely moving films I’ve seen for a long while. It travels with such humanity and grace, and is so note-perfectly acted, directed, scripted and scored that it’s going to be impossible for me to go near doing it justice here. But you’ve got to try.
The film comes across to me as a blown up miniature. It’s a film about something that might seem trivial, unimportant: “it’s nothing, it’s only a bike” we’re told by the policeman to whom Antonio reports its theft. But of course it’s not just a bike, it’s Antonio’s job, it’s his life, and it’s a search that elevates his struggle to the highest reach.
The film is shot in a loose style that works wonders to portray the conditions of the working class inhabitants of post-war Italy. The camera mixes tight close-ups of Antonio and Bruno with long gliding shots that position them within the society they’re living in. The tight shots force us to look at these characters, this struggle, and almost every facial tic gave me a great emotional hit. In the long shots we catch glimpses of other conversations, other stories, other lives that we know are just as important and vital what we’re witnessing up close. A boy that Antonio thinks is his son is pulled out of the river, and we share the fear, but it’s not Bruno, and the story moves restlessly on. We often see Bruno and Antonio walking off into the distance away from the camera. Maybe I’m reading too much into this but it seems as if the film is playing around with some of the conventions of the walk-into-the-sunset finale seen in countless Hollywood films, but here of course it's not that easy, this is reality...the searching continues, life carries on. The Bicycle Thieves avoids following a traditional quest narrative in which we would see the bike retrieved and justice served. Instead the journey that takes place is Bruno’s transformation into a criminal – it is about the destruction of honour, and it’s a desperately sad portrayal of Man and the times he is living in.
The film is intensely humanistic – Antonio’s reluctant belief in a fortune teller who predicts that the bike will be found “quickly or not at all” proves his undoing. He walks outside, collars the first man he sees and incurs the wrath of the innocent man’s family and friends. His belief in mysticism forces him to make a rash, uncontrolled decision that sidetracks him from reality. In a different scene Antonio walks into a religious ceremony and chases a beggar around a church - what use is religion to Antonio? – how will it help him find his bike? make a living? live?
Another function of mixing long and close shots in the film is that it highlights the dichotomy between Antonio as an individual and as part of a crowd. The film uses this idea to awesome effect. In the opening shot he’s picked out of a crowd of men looking for work. From this point on there’s a struggle between Antonio as an individual and Antonio as part of a crowd. He strives to make his own way and to exist outside of the poverty around him, but it’s not easy. After losing his bike he becomes part of the herd who queue for buses. The rain forces him against a wall in line with hundreds of others. He’s portrayed as an honourable man that’s pushed back into line by external forces, and in the final shot, right after he is disgraced and humiliated for attempting to steal a bike himself, the film pushes him back in to a crowd for a final time, his position is sealed.
One of the major reasons the film hit me so hard is that it’s so driven and purposeful, that it isn’t until the screen goes black that you feel able to take stock of what's unfolded and unravel what the film has put you through, and it’s an overwhelming, extraordinary experience. I realised that until the final scenes I’d been attempting to look at the film hopefully, assuming order would be restored, but the devastating finale forces you to reassess, to realise that this has been a journey that’s been heading downwards, not up. And like life, it hurts.
Here’s the basics: Antonio Ricci is an unemployed man living in Rome who’s given a job as a bill poster. He needs a bike for the job, so to make some money he has to pawn his and his wife’s bed sheets. Then he and his son Bruno set off to work. It doesn’t take long before his bike gets stolen, and so begins Antonio and Bruno’s journey to retrieve the bike, a journey that takes them all over the city, meeting all sorts of inhabitants: thieves, beggars, the unemployed. By the film’s end, broken, dejected and desperate to keep hold of his job, Antonio attempts to steal a bike himself.
I’ll quickly get the hysterics out of the way and say that I found this film to be one of the most involving, intensely moving films I’ve seen for a long while. It travels with such humanity and grace, and is so note-perfectly acted, directed, scripted and scored that it’s going to be impossible for me to go near doing it justice here. But you’ve got to try.
The film comes across to me as a blown up miniature. It’s a film about something that might seem trivial, unimportant: “it’s nothing, it’s only a bike” we’re told by the policeman to whom Antonio reports its theft. But of course it’s not just a bike, it’s Antonio’s job, it’s his life, and it’s a search that elevates his struggle to the highest reach.
The film is shot in a loose style that works wonders to portray the conditions of the working class inhabitants of post-war Italy. The camera mixes tight close-ups of Antonio and Bruno with long gliding shots that position them within the society they’re living in. The tight shots force us to look at these characters, this struggle, and almost every facial tic gave me a great emotional hit. In the long shots we catch glimpses of other conversations, other stories, other lives that we know are just as important and vital what we’re witnessing up close. A boy that Antonio thinks is his son is pulled out of the river, and we share the fear, but it’s not Bruno, and the story moves restlessly on. We often see Bruno and Antonio walking off into the distance away from the camera. Maybe I’m reading too much into this but it seems as if the film is playing around with some of the conventions of the walk-into-the-sunset finale seen in countless Hollywood films, but here of course it's not that easy, this is reality...the searching continues, life carries on. The Bicycle Thieves avoids following a traditional quest narrative in which we would see the bike retrieved and justice served. Instead the journey that takes place is Bruno’s transformation into a criminal – it is about the destruction of honour, and it’s a desperately sad portrayal of Man and the times he is living in.
The film is intensely humanistic – Antonio’s reluctant belief in a fortune teller who predicts that the bike will be found “quickly or not at all” proves his undoing. He walks outside, collars the first man he sees and incurs the wrath of the innocent man’s family and friends. His belief in mysticism forces him to make a rash, uncontrolled decision that sidetracks him from reality. In a different scene Antonio walks into a religious ceremony and chases a beggar around a church - what use is religion to Antonio? – how will it help him find his bike? make a living? live?
Another function of mixing long and close shots in the film is that it highlights the dichotomy between Antonio as an individual and as part of a crowd. The film uses this idea to awesome effect. In the opening shot he’s picked out of a crowd of men looking for work. From this point on there’s a struggle between Antonio as an individual and Antonio as part of a crowd. He strives to make his own way and to exist outside of the poverty around him, but it’s not easy. After losing his bike he becomes part of the herd who queue for buses. The rain forces him against a wall in line with hundreds of others. He’s portrayed as an honourable man that’s pushed back into line by external forces, and in the final shot, right after he is disgraced and humiliated for attempting to steal a bike himself, the film pushes him back in to a crowd for a final time, his position is sealed.
One of the major reasons the film hit me so hard is that it’s so driven and purposeful, that it isn’t until the screen goes black that you feel able to take stock of what's unfolded and unravel what the film has put you through, and it’s an overwhelming, extraordinary experience. I realised that until the final scenes I’d been attempting to look at the film hopefully, assuming order would be restored, but the devastating finale forces you to reassess, to realise that this has been a journey that’s been heading downwards, not up. And like life, it hurts.
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