Shared Darkness

Sexual
and erotic obsessions are at the hub of French filmmaker Eric Rohmer’s
canon, but don’t expect unadorned titillation. One of the founding
critics of the history-making Cahiers du cinema, Rohmer began
translating his written manifestos to the big screen in the 1960s,
standing apart from New Wave contemporaries like Jean-Luc Godard and
François Truffaut with his patented brand of gently existential,
hyper-articulate character studies — a thematic forerunner for everyone
from Woody Allen to Gabriele Muccino and Noah Baumbach. Set chiefly
against vivid seasonal landscapes, his half dozen “Moral Tales” — a
succession of jousts between fragile, mostly inwardly reflective men
and the women who tempt them — unleashed upon the world of film a
modern, liberating and nonjudgmental voice, one at once philosophical
and liltingly insightful on sexual matters.

Criterion’s fantastic new six-disc DVD collection, which also
includes a hearty book of essays and the original stories by Rohmer,
celebrates this vision, and kicks off with 1962’s simple, jazzy,
23-minute The Bakery Girl of Monceau. The film centers on a law
student (played by future director Barbet Schroeder) with a large
appetite and equally roving eye who daily stuffs himself full of
pastries in order to garner the attentions of the pretty brunette who
works in a quaint bakery in the Parisian borough of the title. But is
he truly interested, or is she just a sweet diversion? In the following
year’s evocative, 55-minute Suzanne’s Career, Rohmer works his
way deeper into his subject of interest, telling the tale of two
friends and the girl that comes between them. Bertrand (Philippe
Beuzen) bides his time in a casually envious friendship with college
chum and ladies’ man Guillaume (Christian Charrière). But when
Guillaume seems to be making a play for the spirited, independent
Suzanne (Catherine Sée), Bertrand jealousy and disapproval become more
pronounced.

The rest of Rohmer’s works in this arena are feature-length affairs. His first color work, 1967’s La Collectionneuse,
concerns a bombastic, womanizing art dealer (Patrick Bauchau) and his
painter friend (Daniel Pommereulle), who trip to a villa on the Riviera
for a relaxing summer getaway. Their idyll is disturbed, however, by
the presence of the bohemian Haydée (Haydée Politoff), a “collector” of
men. The stars collaborated with their director on the script and
dialogue, and the result is a movie full of remarkably realistic
battle-of-the-sexes jousting.

Coming two years later, the breakout Stateside hit My Night at Maud’s
is the brilliantly accomplished centerpiece of Rohmer’s series.
Jean-Louis Trintignant plays Jean-Louis, one of the great conflicted
figures of ’60s foreign cinema. A pious Catholic engineer in his early
30s, he lives by a strict moral code in order to rationalize his world,
drowning himself in mathematics and the philosophy of Pascal. After
spotting the delicate, blonde Françoise (Marie-Christine Barrault) at
mass, he vows to make her his wife, although when he unwittingly spends
the night at the apartment of bold, brunette divorcée Maud (Françoise
Fabian), his rigid ethical standards are challenged.

Wrapping up Rohmer’s “Moral Tales” are 1970’s Claire’s Knee (above, right) and 1972’s Love in the Afternoon (below; not
to be confused with the 1957 Gary Cooper/Audrey Hepburn film of the
same name). Both films focus on the lit fuse of marital temptation and
its relationship to the powder-keg of moral crisis — the former in the
form of teenagers Beatrice Romand and Laurence de Monaghan, the latter
in the form of the singularly monikered Zouzou’s unencumbered ex-flame.

Newly
restored, high-definition digital transfers grace the set, each
supervised and approved by Rohmer. Original theatrical trailers, a
video conversation between Rohmer and onetime subject Schroeder, a
video afterward with filmmaker Neil LaBute, all manner of archival
interviews, and five of Rohmer’s short films (including 1999’s
little-seen but quite interesting The Curve) also anchor this
wonderful set, and that’s not even getting to the wealth of essays from
a wide-ranging group of contributors that includes Molly Haskell, Geoff
Andrew, Phillip Lopate and Armond White. Rohmer’s films may seem talky
and arid by the standards of some, but they’re fascinating, unfussy and
naturalistic works that have great perspicacity about human nature,
interpersonal communication and relationships both amorous and
fraternal, and they superbly grouped and presented here. A- (Movies) A (Discs)

The
DVD format is great not only for the tricked-out explorations of past
American classics it can offer American film enthusiasts, but also
long-forgotten foreign films it can wash up on our shores anew. After
all, to borrow NBC’s sly small screen marketing line regarding
catalogue repeats, if you haven’t yet seen it, well, it’s “new to you.”
Case in point: two rarely screened Italian classics largely considered
lost, but fresh to DVD, Roma Città Libera and Francesco Maselli’s political drama Open Letter to the Evening News.

Director Marcello Pagliero’s neorealism classic Roma Città Libera is set in a war-shattered Rome newly freed by the Allies. A rainy night brings together four strangers: a heartbroken youth (Black Sunday’s
Andrea Checchi) rescued from taking his own life by the intervention of
a thief (Nando Bruno), a lonely typist (Valentina Cortese) who’s turned
to streetwalking and a distinguished gentleman (Oscar winner Vittorio
de Sica) who’s lost his memory. All four take refuge in a bar
frequented by American GIs, and inside the bar they encounter a group
of jewel smugglers whose leader has stolen the young man’s girlfriend —
the very betrayal that pushed him toward suicide.

Scripted by Ennio Flainano and made during the seminal years of Italian neorealism, 1946’s Roma Città Libera
was directed by Pagliero, famous for having played the stoic
resistance leader tortured to death by the Nazis in Roberto
Rossellini’s incendiary Rome, Open City. Its title is an
understandably purposeful evocation of that film, and the movie’s rich,
redolent location filming, by Aldo Tonti, hints at the same mixture of
street-level grittiness and breathless magic he would a decade later
bring to Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria. Completely
restored from the original vault negative and presented in its original
1.33:1 aspect ratio, in Italian with optional English subtitles, Roma Città Libera
retails for $19.95, and includes an introduction by and separate
interview with screenwriter/assistant director Luigi Filippo D’Amico,
the movie’s original theatrical trailer and an interview with film and
TV journalist Stefano Della Casa.

Open Letter to the Evening News,
from 1970, centers on a group of leftist Italian radicals who, hoping
to shake up their native complacent Communist Party, sends an
incendiary letter to a major evening newspaper declaring their
intention to volunteer to fight American troops in Vietnam as a
political statement against the war. When the newspaper actually prints
the letter, drawing public attention to the situation, the provocateurs
face the hard choice whether their commitment to the cause is worth
risking their lives.

As directed by Francesco Maselli, former assistant to Michelangelo
Antonioni, this searing black-comedy-by-way-of-political-drama is a
brash example of Italy’s celebrated “cinema politico,” and its
scandalous period release interestingly echoes current stories of the
American Taliban and homegrown al Qaeda sympathizers. Despite its
status as a cause célèbre curio, the film has largely languished in
obscurity, denying Maselli his rightful place alongside the provocative
likes of Francesco Rossi and Bernardo Bertolucci and Costa-Gavras.
Spread out over two discs, this exclusive, uncut special edition from
distributor No Shame was prepared with the filmmaker’s participation,
and includes both interviews with him, Virna Lisi and Claudia
Cardinale, an exclusive photo gallery and the feature-length
documentary Fragments of the Twentieth Century, which is
Maselli’s highly personal overview of Italy’s film and political
histories. A collectible booklet, meanwhile, contains previously
unpublished essays by Michelangelo Antonioni and Italo Calvino. B (Movies) B+ (Discs)

It
may sound cruel, but you can oftentimes judge the relative quality of a
super-low-budget flick that happens to have a scene set in a strip club
by the class and lithe attractiveness of its pole-dancers. And the girl
writhing around in the opening moments of Live Feed is, um… not
totally the most toned beauty ever to grace screens big or small. If
slightly more comely ladies eventually drop blouse, it hardly makes this
sadistic Hostel rip-off any more stomachable.

Presented, ironically, by Plotdigger Films, Live Feed is written and directed by special effects artist Ryan Nicholson (Torched, Hell Hath No Fury),
with his father Roy sharing a writing and producing credit, because
apparently the family that makes wretched movies together stays
together. To start off on a somewhat positive note, I’ll grant the
movie this allowance: it features some decently unnerving opening
credits, flashes forward into the grisly terrain we’re about to enter.
Unfortunately, it’s almost all downhill from there.

After a group of five Americans (Taayla Markell, Rob Scattergood,
Caroline Chojnacki, Lee Tichon, Ashley Schappert) vacationing in China
disgustedly witness a dog getting carved up, they stumble into a bar —
where they befriend a brooding Japanese man named Miles (Kevan Ohtsji,
coming the closest to acquitting himself), whose quick talking gets
them out of a dust-up with some thugs — and then a sex club owned by
brutal crime boss (Stephen Chang). Here, drugs are done, best friends
are screwed (both figuratively and literally) and time is bided until
the senseless blood-letting commences, much of it at the hands of a
giant, hooded executioner (Mike Bennett), in the fashion of the recent See No Evil.
Shot in nervous, unfocused fashion by cinematographer Sasha Popove
(exterior scenes are strung together with zoom-laden stock footage, and
the later bloody interiors evince no sense of properly delineated
space) and driven forward in sloppy fashion by Patrick Coble’s score, Live Feed
features precious little interior logic, all manner of inane dialogue
and both blood and awful acting by the bucketful. In short, it had me
at the homely stripper and reaffirmed its awfulness with a sequence
where a guy jams a glass pipe down one victim’s throat so that he may
release a snake directly into her esophagus.

Packaged in a regular Amray case, Live Feed is presented in
16×9 widescreen, with interactive menus, scene selection, trailers and
optional Spanish subtitles. Though not on the review copy we were
serviced with, the final release supposedly includes a
behind-the-scenes, making-of featurette, deleted and alternate scenes,
plus an alternate ending. The film is also available in both rated and
unrated versions, and the latter iteration includes a director and cast
audio commentary track and footage from some of the grisly
movies-within-the-movie that Live Feed incorporates. F (Movie) C (Disc, speculatively)

Jazz
has been one of America’s truly unique and far-ranging inventions, an
art form unto itself. And while there have been many regions throughout
the country that have contributed to the development of the genre, the
coasts have been where a lot of the most timeless evolutions and
recordings have been made, ergo the sometimes awkward, sometimes
arbitrary divisions of Jazz Shots From the East Coast and its left coast partner.

This
outstanding continuing series of DVDs pays homage to the two respective
coasts and to some of the most important musicians who spent major
portions of their careers in one of the two titular hubs. While a great
many of these musicians were born in the Midwest or the South and later
moved to one of the two coasts, what is taken into account when placing
the musician is both where they spent the bulk of their artistic career
and where they recorded their most influential works, as well as the
nexus of subsequent generations that they in turn influenced. A bit
subjective? You bet, but unlikely to start an East Coast/West Coast
beef that will take down major players or fans. And hey, if it tricks a
few geographical chest-thumpers into discovering more about jazz, I’m
all for it.

In Jazz Shots From the East Coast, John Coltrane’s “Afro
Blue” is notable for the way it takes a minor slip in key and bends it
into a new clever new phrase, while Miles Davis & the Gil Evans
Orchestra give “The Duke,” “Blues for Pablo” and “New Rumba” notable
workouts. Mission: Impossible composer Lalo Schifrin pops up on
several numbers tickling ivories, including the Dizzy Gillespie
Quintet’s “Blues After Dark” and “Lorraine.” (And yes, the
aforementioned maestro’s cheeks still reached comical, bullfrog
proportions even back then.) Other standout tracks include the Count
Basie Orchestra’s “Dickie’s Dream,” Charlie Parker’s “Hothouse,” Louis
Armstrong’s “Someday” and Miles Davis and John Coltrane trading licks
on “So What.”

Jazz Shots From the West Coast includes plenty of
contributions from Teddy Edwards, the under-regarded Wes Montgomery,
the Shorty Rogers Quintet and Lester Young (including a nifty rendition
of “On the Sunny Side of the Street”), but Stan Kenton’s short, sweet
“Limehouse Blues” and the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s “Take Five” and “(It’s
a) Raggy Waltz” leave a lasting impression as well.

Packaged in regular Amray cases, each disc in the Jazz Shots
series comes keyed in its own color, and is presented in 1.33:1 full
frame. Though frequently lacking in crispness of image, the transfers
are generally pretty good in terms of grain, and some of the footage is
in color and some in black-and-white. The artistry on display also
varies pretty widely; evocative close-ups and fade ins and outs stud
the Jimmy Smith Trio’s “Walk on the Wild Side” and a few other tracks,
while others are shot in straightforward, pedestrian fashion.
Unfortunately, there aren’t any supplemental bonus features to round
out these titles, but they are — individually and collectively — superb
and engaging treats, either as introductions to jazz or valentines for
longtime fans. B+ (Shows) C- (Disc)