Adiós Amigo

“It was more than being holy and it was less than being free”

All things must pass...I’m outta here...

Henry Jaglom and Paul Mazursky directed by Orson Welles

A scene from Welles’s The Other Side of the Wind (1972).

Traffic: John Barleycorn Must Die (1970)

1. Glad (Winwood) 7:01
2. Freedom Rider (Winwood/Capaldi) 5:30
3. Empty Pages (Winwood/Capaldi) 4:39
4. I Just Want You to Know (Capaldi/Winwood) 1:30
5. Stranger to Himself (Winwood/Capaldi) 3:57
6. John Barleycorn (Must Die) (traditional-arr. Winwood) 6:28
7. Every Mother's Son (Winwood/Capaldi) 7:07

Link

(Via Victor)

Vernal confection: Voyage en douce

Le Voyage en douce

Directed by Michel Deville. Screenplay by Mr. Deville with the collaboration of Francois-Regis Bastide, Camille Bourniquel, Muriel Cerf, Jean Chalon, Pierrette Grainville, Yves Navarre, Jacques Perry, Maurice Pons, Beatrice Privat, Suzanne Prou, Frederic Rey, Dominique Rolin and Isaure de Saint-Pierre. Director of photography, Claude Lecomte. Edited by Raymonde Guyot. Music by Beethoven, Brahms and Quentin Damamme. With Dominique Sanda, Geraldine Chaplin, Jacques Zabor, Valerie Masterson, Christophe Malavoy. 95 minutes. France; originally released in 1981.

Two intelligent, beautiful women pushing thirty — friends since childhood — take a long weekend together in the south of France, tell each other stories, try on different outfits, eat, take photographs, argue, flirt… Depending on one’s tolerance for such things, there are far worse ways you can spend ninety-five minutes. Directed by Michel Deville, with Dominique Sanda and Geraldine Chaplin at their prime and on screen for nearly all of the picture, Le Voyage en douce is a pastel reflection on memory, aging, sexuality, nostalgia, infidelity, dreams and dashed hopes, all in the guise of a summery, erotic confection.

    Deville wrote the screenplay with the help of more than a dozen collaborators, each lending sundry anecdotes to flesh out the itinerant Hélène (Sanda) and Lucie (Chaplin). They’re both married, Hélène with two young children and Lucie childless, living lives that fall short of their youthful expectations. Admissions and visualizations of disorder and frustration merge with fantasies and vague recollections, causing the lines separating fact from fiction to blur.

    As he’d later do in La Lectrice (1988), Deville segues freely between the two, often accompanied by a narration which may or may not be riddled with fabrication. He subtly changes our perception of the narrative form, to a point where we’re no longer concerned about situations as much as we are about the personalities involved. Some of the significant issues which are raised — who’s that man sitting next to Hélène at the recital? why has Lucie’s husband removed all the doors inside their home? — go unanswered, enticing us to fill in the blanks, albeit with yet more questions. Is Hélène sleeping with Lucie’s husband? Is Lucie a suicide risk?

Sanda & Chaplin (click to enlarge)

    With serene passages from Beethoven’s bagatelles fluttering on its soundtrack, the attempt to explore the female psyche appears genuine (and Deville couldn’t have cast better players), but Le Voyage en douce clearly stems from a biased perspective. Male characters are distant, one-dimensional and generally lascivious, a convenient means for Deville to avoid scrutinizing his own sex, if not himself. And at their core, Hélène and Lucie are undermined by varying levels of confusion, that archaic but pervasive male interpretation of female weakness.

    Taking a long weekend away from the controlling men in their lives, they’re hounded by reminders of actual and imagined shortcomings and disheartenment. Far less articulate or worldly than the characters in an Eric Rohmer film, Deville offers Hélène as an emblem of determination and sensuality, while Lucie carries the burden of excessive innocence and frailty. Unlike the similarly disparate (and desperate) pair in Thelma & Louise (1991), Hélène and Lucie never quite entwine as one — Hélène’s masculine side would never allow it and Lucie’s just too scared.

    When the film was released in 1981, Geraldine Chaplin (daughter of Charles and Oona, granddaughter of Eugene O’Neill) was in the midst of an odd, burgeoning career, balancing big box office productions such as Doctor Zhivago (1965), The Hawaiians (1970), Z.P.G. (1970), and The Three Musketeers (1973), with Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975), Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976), and A Wedding (1978), as well as the start of a long, fruitful relationship on and off camera with director Carlos Saura. Her excellent performance in Le Voyage en douce offers a bare vulnerability that nearly fills the void in Sanda’s Hélène.

    Riding the crest of an auspicious decade that began with her debut in Robert Bresson’s Une femme douce (1969), Dominique Sanda attained international success in Bertolucci’s Il Conformista (1970) and 1900 (1976), and De Sica’s Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini (1970). She made bids for mainstream stardom in Philippe Labor’s Sans mobile apparent (1971), John Huston’s The MacKintosh Man (1973), Jack Smight’s Damnation Alley (1977), and J. Lee Thompson’s Caboblanco (1980), but they failed to find an audience and Sanda soon retreated to smaller efforts and television work. When she made Le Voyage en douce, the actress had attained a state of physical perfection, her flawless, tan silky skin and hair gently softened by the sun. Sanda uses her appearance to flavor Hélène as someone not necessarily vain but aware of her beauty as both a blessing and a curse.

    Their journey through the provincial villages, afternoons spent in outdoor cafes or lazing about in airy hotel rooms, pass by in a succession of warm, inviting earth tones captured by cinematographer Claude Lecomte. He began his long but largely forgotten career on Deville’s Une balle dans le canon (1958; co-directed by Charles Gérard), a partnership which continued into the 1980s: Ce soir ou jamais (1961), À cause, à cause d'une femme (1963), L’Ours et la poupée (1969), La Femme en bleu (1973), Le Dossier 51 (1978), and La Petite bande (1983), among others. Lecomte’s best work, however, was for Jean-Loup Hubert’s Le Grand chemin (1987), where he mined the rich hues of rural Brittany.

    Despite its flaws, Le Voyage en douce is an engaging look at potential blithe spirits locked away in self-constructed prisons. It may appear to lack an intellectual edge, but Deville works prudently between the lines. And the countryside, Sanda and Chaplin are simply radiant.

Biting the Big Apple

For nearly an hour, Enchanted (2007) is a mildly amusing fantasy about the cartoon characters of a make believe kingdom — talking chipmunk, fair maiden, handsome prince, wicked witch and her dimwit henchman — transformed into live actors (and one CGI rodent) relocated to the streets of New York City. There’s a lot to be said about happiness and humility collapsing under irony and cynicism, along with the corporate Disneyfication of our cities, and while the film devotes most of its time to comedy, music and dance, there’s the sense that it’s aware of these deeper concerns as well. The effort is woefully undone, however, by the miscalculated final act where the evil queen becomes a cheesy animated dragon in a daft homage to King Kong. Too bad, because Susan Sarandon is splendid as the villain and Amy Adams possesses the proper naiveté as a girl barely maintaining her innocence in a dystopian society.

Remembrance of things past

A song from my childhood, Le Temps des souvenirs by Françoise Hardy. My late sister Monica bought the EP in 1966 and from that day I played this one track over and over for the next ten years. You’ll need to jack up the volume for this prehistoric video, where Françoise strolls around in her jammies as some sign-hanger dude is having a time of it with her poster. If part of the song sounds like something you heard in Lost Highway, you’re correct!

Today’s dollbabe

Alyson Michalka…born in 1989...frequently seen on the Disney Channel...kinda reminds me of Sophia Loren...

I ain’t no cowboy…

Trouble in mind: Robbie & Marty

Between Trains

Written and performed by Robbie Robertson with Garth Hudson and Richard Manuel for the King of Comedy soundtrack.

Vinyl rip


I ain't no cowboy
I just look like one
And I ain't no prisoner
But I'm on the run from these chains
And I'm just between trains

I ain't no loner
I just work alone
There ain't no place
Where there's a home I could claim
And I'm still between trains
Still between trains

CHORUS
I've got to let it roll
I've got to let it ride
I can never show
What's really going on inside
If I'm too young to learn
Or too old to change
I guess I'll always be
Between trains

I ain't no soldier
But I've been to war
I done some killin'
All I kill anymore is the pain
And I'm just between trains

Just passin' through
Never stayed this long
in one place
So when I'm gone just lay my remains
Somewhere between trains
Somewhere between trains

Where the shadows run from themselves

“There isn’t one false emotion in Dear Zachary, no moment of doubt. Equal parts horror and epiphany, it is a masterpiece that draws its power from the best and worst within us.” Read the review now on Flickhead.

Acey Ducey

Dollbabes in toyland: Jim Sturgess & Kate Bosworth crap out in 21

Jim Sturgess’s collegiate character Ben in 21 (2008) is brilliant, we’re told. He memorizes numbers, instantly figures logistics, and determines odds in a flash. He’s taken on by academic mastermind Kevin Spacey for weekend card counting at Vegas blackjack tables, a mathematical process the script apparently doesn’t grasp judging by how quickly we’re whisked through the rules. About twenty minutes into it, Ben stashes thousands in cash in the drop ceiling of his dorm. What kind of odds are we talking about here? What if there were a fire? An electrician or plumber needing to get at overhead wiring or pipes? Wouldn’t anyone with half a brain put the loot in a safe deposit box? He intends to use the money to pay tuition at Harvard. Wouldn’t the IRS ask questions when it came time to cut that hefty check? Adios, credibility: Ben’s an idiot and a warning sign to aspiring screenwriters — if you’re going to make your character a genius, be sure to grant them an IQ. The evening’s trailers included What Happens in Vegas, a Cameron Diaz comedy that looks as worn and weathered as her sun-damaged skin (I’ve never been an advocate of Botox, but…); and the, uh, “long awaited” big screen revival of the Mel Brooks-Buck Henry TV show, Get Smart (albeit not a sequel to The Nude Bomb) with Steve Carell as Don Adams and Anne Hathaway as Barbara Feldon. In order to placate the chickenshit politically correct, they’ve jettisoned the robot spy Hymie and that nefarious Chinese mastermind The Claw (“Not craw, craw!”), while the deranged German Jew Siegfried is now played by Brit Terence Stamp. Yes, that Terence Stamp.

On DVD…

Considering all the recent hoopla over Cloverfield, I’d think horror fans would be demanding the Nobel Prize for Shrooms (2007), an economic and nifty dead teenager movie. A vanload of unlikely friends take a trip, physically and mentally, in an Irish forest littered with psilocybin mushrooms, dark forces and a talking cow. As dumb as a box of rocks, but as entertaining as watching someone you hate weather a bad trip.

If Flickhead were a cute girl in her twenties, Lie with Me (2005) could be a biopic. I ID’d with lead character Leila’s self destructive tendencies and her inability to perceive relationships beyond the physical. Lauren Lee Smith is outstanding as Leila. Screenwriter Tamara Faith Berger adapted her own novel (she’s written a few books about confused nymphomaniacs), Clément Virgo directs. Complex, literate, a hidden gem. Can anyone tell me the name of the song played during the end credits?

I never saw the earlier (and widely panned) Canadian DVD release from “Shock Records,” but the new Universal-Focus edition of David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) looks fine to me, although it’s void of extras. (For technical comparisons of all the DVD versions, visit DVD Beaver.) In fact, I hadn’t seen the film since the day it opened theatrically, when I nearly nodded off during its hazy, fragmented observations on the duality of nature and postmodern decadence. It was a weird time in Lynch’s career, as the success of Blue Velvet (1986) led to overkill: Industrial Symphony, Wild at Heart, the whole Twin Peaks fiasco, On the Air, Hotel Room — a lot of hollow beauty. Like last year’s Inland Empire, Lost Highway is chockablock with intriguing elements minus the quasi-linear form of Blue Velvet or Mulholland Dr. His noodling is, as they say, an acquired taste. Still, it’s hard to resist Lost Highway in its best moments: the mystery videotape (a neat gimmick swiped by Michael Haneke for Caché), Robert Loggia’s road rage meltdown, the allusions to Kiss Me Deadly and Meshes of the Afternoon, any scene with Robert Blake, and the absolutely delicious Patricia Arquette.

Suck or be sucked

Olga Kurylenko in Paris, je t'aime

“Eric Nuzum’s timely marketing venture for October 2008 at bookstores should have appealed to readers with a special place in their hearts for that month’s holiday.” Steve Fiorilla reviews Nuzum’s new book, The Dead Travel Fast: Stalking Vampires from Nosferatu to Count Chocula now on Flickhead.