It's only July and I'm already over summer. I can't help myself.
Even with the occasional saving graces of Minority Report and Road to Perdition, I have to confess that all the exploding, screaming whozits and digitally manipulated whatzits have had their way with me. I'm ready for them to just go away. Even a little break would be appreciated.
Summer Hollywood-style can be the cruelest season. That's why, after a typically excruciating week contending with the likes of Adam Sandler, David Arquette and several hundred computer-generated mutant-spiders, I increasingly find myself feeling the need to rush home to restore my equilibrium, not to mention my sanity.
It's there, far from the madding crowd, that summer fades away and the movies become real again. I can get comfortable, remind myself of why God created DVD players, slip in a disc and settle into of one of those movies that never fails to remind me of why I fell in love with movies in the first place. It's simple, but it works.
One of best antidotes to summer I can think of is Bob le Flambeur (Bob the Gambler), a pure pleasure to which I recently retreated after a particularly unpleasant evening spent watching Chris Rock and Anthony Hopkins impersonating spies. Bob le Flambeur was one of the first movies I ever fell in love with and, like most first loves, it will always be very special to me.
I had never been to Paris when I first saw Bob, some 22 years ago, but the movie made me feel like I had. The actual narrative of Jean-Pierre Melville's 1956 film often seems almost like an afterthought to the detailed and richly atmospheric portrait of Montmartre street life painted by the film. It's a portrait of a place that, even then, probably existed more as a memory of the filmmaker's than as an actual physical location — like the rest of the world, that particular Parisian neighborhood had already changed almost beyond recognition — but that didn't make it any less real for me. It still doesn't.
This tough, bittersweet tale of aging gentlemen thieves and that eternal One Last Heist borrows considerably from Rififi (the two movies even share a screenwriter), but Melville's film is the more personal of the pair, and the one most closely approximating poetry. You can practically feel the rain falling on those late night/early morning Montmartre streets and smell the smoke curling through the nightclubs, bars and back rooms of the movie's gloriously seedy, black-and-white locations. Roger Duchesne cuts an elegantly authoritative figure as the world-weary, silver-haired Bob, striding through a noir-ish underworld as fatalistic as it is undeniably romantic.
As with so many older films that have been restored and given digital makeovers, Bob le Flambeur looks even better now on DVD than it did all those years ago on the big screen. The picture quality on the Criterion Collection DVD is breathtakingly sharp and damage-free, with some of the richest, purest blacks you'll ever see this side of deep space. The subtitles have been tweaked too, giving what appears to be a more accurate translation of the tricky French slang of the "50s, and there are even a pair of extraordinary bonus features: a truly enlightening video interview with Bob co-star Daniel Couchy and a very rare 1961 radio interview with Melville himself, in which much is made of how he inspired Godard and the other young lions of the French New Wave. A handsomely designed booklet with another lengthy Melville interview completes this lovely tribute to one of my favorite movies.
As long as love and Montmartre are in the air, let's continue forgetting summer by not forgetting Jean-Pierre Jeunet's sweetly fetching Amelie, a trifle that's gilded with something approaching genius. You may remember Jeunet as the dark visionary behind Delicatessen and City of Lost Children, but the Oscar-nominated Amelie is a much brighter and more elemental confection. This is fluff raised to the level of art.
Amelie wears its heart proudly on its sleeve even as it calls to mind all those glorious old Looney Tunes freak-outs where something is always happening and the screen seems to vibrate with visual and verbal gags. If the film feels like a cartoon, though, then it's a cartoon of the cosmic variety — as much about fate and destiny as anything by Kieslowski (or Tex Avery). Our plucky and quintessentially quirky heroine Amelie (played by the saucer-eyed Audrey Tautou, who actually looks like a cartoon character) spends the entire movie tempting fate by arranging good deeds and choreographing love connections for her neighbors and, eventually, herself.
As is his stylistic wont, Jeunet crams every inch of the film with marvelously composed shots of bric-a-brac and arcane doodads, lavishing equal, fetishistic attention upon a kitschy garden gnome and the sensual pleasure of cracking open the crust on a well-turned creme brulee. Simply put, it's a gorgeous movie, and the seductively vibrant widescreen transfer on the new Miramax 2-DVD edition slips us right into Amelie's world.
The rest of the DVD goes a long way towards fleshing out that world, from Jeunet's amusing commentary (offered in both English and French), to Q&As with the director and cast, to blooper reels, screen tests and home videos of Tautou getting her hair cut, to a chat with Jeunet about the film's reception at Cannes — where it was blasted by PC critics as being misleading and possibly unhealthy in its depiction of a Paris that was somehow too beautiful.
This completely misses the point, of course. Jeunet's film is obviously a fairy tale, and an impossibly charming one at that. It doesn't pretend to be anything else. Amelie is as much a dreamscape as the darkly glistening streets of Bob le Flambeur, and whenever we're lucky enough to be invited into rarified spaces like these we shouldn't hesitate to consider it anything but a love connection and the purest of pleasures.
The case could be made that Amelie, in its own remarkable way, is just as much an escapist fantasy as your basic, run-of-the-mill summer movie — but not so with the final film in our "Just Say No to Summer" lineup, Todd Solondz's Storytelling.
If you thought Solondz's Happiness was the ultimate in uncomfortably edgy, button-pushing stuff, wait until you see Storytelling. Sacred cows such as race, religion, physical and mental disabilities, the very essence of our contemporary PC culture — it's all fair game for Solondz, who here crafts a complex and unforgiving satire that sometimes appears to be a sick joke reborn as an art film.
Storytelling is made up of two parts, "Fiction" and "Non-Fiction," that on the surface are completely different from each other but which actually share some absurd and even chilling similarities. The first section concerns a well-meaning white college student who enters into a humiliating and abusive sexual liaison with her black professor, largely because she doesn't want to appear racist (even to herself).
Storytelling stirred up a major controversy when Solondz refused to cut the outrageously explicit sex scene between the student and the teacher, instead choosing to get his "R" rating by simply letting the scene play out with a huge, bright red box obscuring the offending activity. On New Line Entertainment's DVD, by the way, we now have the option of watching either the postmodern Red Box version or the previously unseen, warts-n-all Unrated version. Ah, the joys of technology.
Suburbia is skewered even more mercilessly here than it was in Solondz's Welcome to the Dollhouse. After the clueless college girl in "Fiction," we get a whole family of suburban dunderheads in "Non-Fiction," and an aspiring filmmaker who wants to make a movie about them. Toby, the wannabe filmmaker of Storytelling, is basically a thinly veiled version of Todd Solondz himself, with the director blasting away at himself this time.
Reflecting exactly the sort of charges that are often made against Solondz, Toby stands accused of being glib and facile, of making fun of his subjects and exploiting them just so he can feel superior to them (a charge that, for both the real and fictional filmmaker, often appears justified). Similarly, there's also a lot of Solondz in the character of the black professor, a prize-winning author whose books are criticized as being too "aggressively confrontational."
Storytelling is tough, complex stuff. It's never completely clear if Solondz actually likes any of these people, or even if there's anything to be learned from all this. At the same time, the film is smart, provocative, richly ironic, and contains some of the most scathing and brutally funny moments of any movie of the past year.
Storytelling won't be for everyone, but that's exactly as it should be. Unlike all those summer movies that do attempt to pass themselves off as something for everyone, Storytelling — like Amelie, Bob le Flambeur and all the other movies that offer a refuge from summer — is passionate, original, and nothing less than a labor of love. One more reason for avoiding the multiplexes until fall.
Lance Goldenberg can be reached at lance.goldenberg@weeklyplanet.com or 813-248-8888, ext. 157.
This article appears in Jul 24-30, 2002.