The River or Le Fleuve

The River meandered in and met me on one of my many internet jaunts. Never knew of this movie's existence before a search for 'a movie to calm your mind' brought it up in on the inter-webs.

This Jean Renoir film from 1951 is one of the most accurate and realistic depictions of India from a Western perspective. There is even a question that one of the characters - new to the subcontinent asks a long time settler from the West, that whether he would see any person climbing on the rope and vanish into nothingness and the settler answers in the negative. Even today that is the kind of India the West has come to believe exists, but nothing could be farther than reality, even in 1951.


It is a coming of a age movie with real blood and bone characters. As someone brought up in India in the latter half of twentieth century who has never seen any Caucasians living as residents of the country, it was interesting and informative to see how the whites (not just the ruling class of British citizens) co-existed with the locals and how common it was in pre-independent India.


The story is set in Bengal in an area which falls in the present day Bangladesh. The Indians in the story celebrate Hindu festivals of Diwali and Holi. The director Jean Renoir shows the landscape of India in vibrant colors, but none which feels synthetic like a Bollywood movie or the caricature of India portrayed in the Temple of Doom or many other Hollywood movies fully or partially based in India. Like the director, the writer of the story, Rumer Golden deserves credit for having the guns to stick to reality.

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Tell No One (Ner Le Dis A Personne)

Tell No One is a film French imported from America. Adapted from US mystery/thriller writer Harlan Coban's 2001 novel of the same name, Tell No One won four Cesar awards in 2007. It is an interesting thriller where Dr.David Beck, a dermatalogist is wrongly accused of murder and is on the run. The similarity with Fugitive ends there. Tell No One has more layers of intrigue than straight as an arrow Harrison Ford starrer.

My gripe with French movies is their emotional eloquence that makes most of them a dissective study of human relationships. This movie thankfully doesn't  fall into that trap, although it does have the standard nude swimming scene which is prerequisite for French movies. It is an interesting movie to watch, humane yet suspenseful. One thing I noticed about movies in any language is that to make the movie more beguiling, its sound track has music in some foreign language at key scenes. If the film is in English, it is usually the seductive Spanish salsa or the throaty whisper of a French tune. Since this is a French film, English songs get to do the honors. A good movie from director Guillaume Canet.

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It All Starts Today

French movies bore me with their length and their lack of dialog for minutes at a time. As one of my friends put it, I have bought myself in to the Hollywood culture, maybe I have.

This French movie starring Philippe Torreton as a kindergarten teacher is long by Hollywood standards but has ample conversation. It is the story of an ordinary everyday man who sometimes fails, sometimes triumphs trying to fight for the good cause in the midst of a failing economy and wretched cirumstances. It is like a piece of life presented before an audience without any makeup.

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Swimming Pool

French films or the films shot in France makes me a bit wary before watching it, most of them are too intellectual for my taste, I guess after all these years of movie watching, I still like the 'trashy' Hollywood.

Swimming Pool, directed by Francois Ozon didn't confirm to my idea of films shot in France. It is about an English mystery story writer who goes to her publisher's vacation house in France for some peace and quiet to start on her next novel. But her peace is shattered when the publisher's teenage daughter arrives to share the house with her. There is a lot of uncalled for nudity, maybe it is 'called for' to give it the French touch and with a sexy French girl around how could one expect anything else? But all in all it is an interesting story which ruffles its mystery and suspense feathers towards the end, not bad as I had expected.

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Hiroshima Mon Amor

I have decided to stop taking French films - they are artsy to the point of being slow and boring. It is supposedly a world classic from director Alain Resnais. It starts off like a documentary shot in slow motion, turns out it is two lovers talking to each other. I cannot concentrate on two people and their monotonous conversations long even if it revolves around something as catastrophic as Hiroshima.

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Mr Klein

It is a bit confusing, a bit slow for all the suspense it has and follows the French filmdom's rule of not ending happily - the end is always a compromise, not too sad but not a fairytale ending either.

Alain Delon who also starred in Le Cercle Rouge is the leading man, who is an art collecter/seller in Paris who is mistaken for a Jew and sent to prison camp during WW2. It is a charismatic movie, but I'd have prefered a different ending than the self-destructive one this one has.

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Intimate Strangers

A French art house movie - kind that is usually adapted from a play, where almost all the scenes take place in one particular setting. Not exactly my kind of movie, I get bored when all that people do is talk, talk and more talk. But I have to agree, if viewers are to appreciate such a film it calls for great performances from the actors and actresses involved - which this film has, though I prefer something less sombre and more happening.

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Le Cercle Rouge

A heist movie - this time its French for a change. Although after watching heist after heist movies - the Italian job, Mamet's Heist, Reservoir Dogs and the like, I think I arrived a bit late at the Red Circle. But it has a quality that Hollywood films lack - it lacks coolness, it is more real, more gritty and more human like. The scheming thieves lack the super hero genes so common in the Hollywood kind. But all said and done I like the Hollywood ending better, when the thieves win!

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Lovers on the Bridge(Amants du Pont-Neuf, Les)

Another French love story, this time it is set during the bicentennial of the French revolution - 1989 and stars Juliette Binoche and Denis Lavant.

Two homeless bums, meet on Paris's oldest bridge - Pont Neuf, closed for renovation and their home for the moment. Its kind of slow moving at the start, but the story picks up and you'll find yourself in the middle of an interesting love story. It makes me wonder at the different sorts of people who end up homeless, all bums have a history, eh? Directed by Leos Carax I'd not call it a moving love story, maybe if you want to see a different foreign film, this could be it.

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Jules and Jim

This sure was a strange film. I wonder why Jules and Jim was so famous? Maybe because of its revolutionary story line(the story takes place before and after WW1) or is it because of the director, the famous Francois Truffaut?

What I found from the movie is that lot of French films have a narrator who links the various scenes of the movie. This movie(1962) has it, so has Amelie and so has the Spanish Apartment. My experience is limited to the movies I have watched. Another question I have is, why is it called Jules and Jim, it should be called something like Catastrophical Catherine or something. The movie is a love triangle between Jules,Catherine and Jim. I liked one dialog in the movie, where Jims tells Catherine(played by the immortal Jeanne Moreau) which transcripts to the idea that - "lot of us have the dream of making love to the stranger we met on the train, but for the sake of our significant other and for the sake of the love between us, we rise above that dream, above that selfishness and dedicate ourselves totally to our significant other, but you Catherine cannot do that." The whole movie revolves around this handicap of Catherine, not my cup of tea.

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Maelstorm

This French-Canadian film by Denis Villeneuve is said to have won many awards. It starts with a fish, on the cutting table, which is just about to be cut and packed into cans divulging some of the great philosophies of life by telling us the story of a young woman. Water or shades of water is the predominant color theme of the film. It reminds me of the Kiezlowski films, Blue or was it White? There is too much stress on making it artsy and thereby unco-ordinated. Too much co-incidences and plots linked to plots thru' some random and seemingly senseless incidents at the time, but which are shown connected later on. Hmm... Iam getting confused already.

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Venus Beauty Salon 

Directed by Tonie Marshall, this 1999 French movie tells the story of the lives of three girls working in a beauty salon in Paris. The film revolves mainly around one of the girls, Angele played by Nathalie Baye who lives a life of loneliness pursuing meaningless relationships with men. For me it was a film to see how ordinary people in other parts of the world lived (in this case - Paris). It was surprising to note that the beauty salon, the beauticians, the surroundings is very much similar to that we have at home. People are the same whether they are in Paris, Vladivostok or Mumbai. Forgot to tell there is a very innocent looking vixen of an Audrey Tataou in the film too.

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