Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 49: Fri Feb 18

Mississippi Mermaid (Truffaut, 1969): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 8.35pm

This Francois Truffaut film is part of the director's season is also being screened on Ferbruary 6th and 25th at BFI Southbank (full details here).

Chicago Reader review:
Francois Truffaut’s free adaptation of Cornell Woolrich’s masochistically doom-ridden Waltz Into Darkness, in ‘Scope and color, yields an unsuccessful but sympathetic exploration of the filmmaker’s underrated darker side. A wealthy tobacco planter (Jean-Paul Belmondo) sends for a mail-order bride, and the mysterious lady who turns up is not the woman he was led to expect but Catherine Deneuve. Stately and languorous in its dreamy melancholy, though never entirely convincing, this 1969 picture is full of movie references—even the cabin at the end of Truffaut’s own Shoot the Piano Player figures centrally. But perhaps its ultimate justification is that of Truffaut’s other morbid films, such as The Bride Wore Black and The Green Room: a doomed romantic protagonist (in this case Belmondo) who goes the limit.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 48: Thu Feb 17

The Queen of the Stock Exchange (Edel, 1916): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.40pm

This 35mm presentation (also including 1916 film The Guinea Pig) is also being screened on February 5th and is part of the Asta Nielsen season at BFI Southbank (full details here).

BFI introduction: Asta Nielsen plays a woman at home in a man’s world in The Queen of the Stock Exchange. She’s the co-owner of a copper mine (an excellent opportunity for some location shooting), who makes the mistake of mixing business and romance – with potentially terrible consequences. This is a no-holds-barred melodrama, with Nielsen supremely embodying both the contemporary ideal of a modern woman and a tragic lover.

Here (and above) is an introduction to Asta Nielse's remarkable career.

Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 47: Wed Feb 16

It Felt Like Love (Hittman, 2013): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.30pm

This film, also screening on February 6th, part of the female coming-of-age films at BFI Southbank (full details here).

Chicago Reader review:
Eliza Hittman’s Brooklyn-shot debut feature (2013) ruminates on our society’s sexualization of early adolescent girls, centering on a lonely 14-year-old who starts indulging her curiosity about sex without understanding the risks. There are many explicit images involving teens, yet they make one feel sorrowful rather than voyeuristic; Hittman draws attention to the pervasive cultural forces (rap music, Internet pornography, suggestive dancing on TV) that present young girls as sexual objects, making the scenes of exploitation seem sadly inevitable. In her approach to teen sexuality, Hittman shows uncommon seriousness for an American filmmaker, but if you’ve seen any recent French art movies on the subject, you may find this rather familiar (at one point, she re-creates the most famous scene in Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl).
Ben Sachs

Here (and above) is the trailer.

 

Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 46: Tue Feb 15

The Green Room (Truffaut, 1978): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.40pm

This Francois Truffaut film is part of the director's season is also being screened on Ferbruary 10th and 23rd at BFI Southbank (full details here).

Chicago Reader review:
Stillborn but intriguing Francois Truffaut film (1978), assembled from two short stories by Henry James. The filmmaker himself stars as a journalist whose life is centered on the memory of his dead wife; he meets a young woman (Nathalie Baye) with a similar obsession, and together they construct an altar to all their dead–family, friends, heroes–in an abandoned chapel. Truffaut is attempting a philosophical disquisition on the presence of the lost, the ways in which the dead remain a part of our lives, but his theme can’t escape the morbid eccentricity of his characters; the film dead-ends in sheer neurosis. Photographed, in fecund greens and withering yellows, by Nestor Almendros.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 45: Mon Feb 14

In the Mood for Love (Kar-wai, 2000): Close-Up Cinema, 8.15pm

Chicago Reader review:
A brooding chamber piece (2000) about a love affair that never quite happens. Director Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong’s most romantic filmmaker, is known for his excesses, and in that sense the film’s spareness represents a bold departure. Claustrophobically set in adjacent flats in 1962 Hong Kong, where two young couples find themselves sharing space with other people, it focuses on a newspaper editor and a secretary at an export firm (Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, the sexiest duo in Hong Kong cinema) who discover that their respective spouses are having an affair on the road. Wong, who improvises his films with the actors, endlessly repeats his musical motifs and variations on a handful of images, rituals, and short scenes (rainstorms, cab rides, stairways, tender and tentative hand gestures), while dressing Cheung in some of the most confining (though lovely) dresses imaginable, whose mandarin collars suggest neck braces.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 44: Sun Feb 13

Fahrenheit 451 (Truffaut, 1966): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 12.40pm

This film, part of the Francois Truffaut season, is an oddity that has grown in stature over the years. When the movie was released no one really expected a sci-fi movie from Francois Truffaut and most were both puzzled and disappointed but its depiction of an authoritarian state that has outlawed books looks amazing (partly thanks to Nic Roeg's superb cinematography).

There are other numerous pleasures along the way, including Julie Christie (think Deborah Kerr in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp or the central character in Luis Bunuel's That Obscure Object of Desire) playing both the hero's wife and his lover and the innovative opening credits. There is also the music which, and I don't say this lightly, contains some of Bernard Herrmann's finest work. The film may lose its way towards the end but the denoument aside this is a work very much worthy of investigation.

Here is an interview with Truffaut on Hitchcock (just for the hell of it). The film is also being screened at the NFT (oh go on indulge me) on February 5th and 27th (details here).

Time Out review:
An underrated film, perhaps because it is less science fiction than a tale of 'once upon a time'. Where Ray Bradbury's novel posited a strange, terrifyingly mechanised society which has banned books in the interests of material well-being, Truffaut presents a cosy world not so very different from our own, with television a universal father-figure pouring out reassuring messages, and the only element of menace a fire-engine tearing down the road. A bright, gleaming childhood red, the engine is like a reminder of toyhood days; and as Werner's fireman hero goes about his task of destroying literature, his growing awareness of the almost human way in which books curl up and die in the flames gradually assumes the dimensions of a quest for a legendary lost treasure - movingly glimpsed as he slowly and painfully deciphers the title-page of David Copperfield. Here the rich, nostalgic pull of the past wins out over technocracy, and the film ends, as it began, with a scene lifted right out of time: a wonderful shot of the rebels - each dedicated to the preservation of a literary masterpiece by committing it to memory - wandering in contented, idyllic exile by the edge of a glitteringly icy lake.
Tom Milne

Here (and above) are the sublime opening credits.

Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 43: Sat Feb 12

 Silken Skin (Truffaut, 1964): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 5.20pm

 
This Francois Truffaut film is part of the director's season is also being screened on Ferbruary 6th and 26th at BFI Southbank (full details here).

Time Out review:
Those whose knowledge of French nouvelle vague linchpin François Truffaut begins with ‘The 400 Blows’ and ends with ‘Jules and Jim’ should seek out this steely 1964 study in the cruel mechanics of illicit love. Like one of Eric Rohmer’s ‘Moral Tales’ recast as a smouldering thriller, the film is marked by an intense, unromantic rigour absent in the director’s early work. It traces paunchy, middle-aged publisher and lecturer Pierre Lachenay (Jean Desailly) as he heedlessly ditches his loving wife and child so he can romp around the countryside with a coquettish air hostess (Françoise Dorléac). It’s conservative, as Truffaut views Pierre’s actions as immoral. But it’s more concerned with the logistics of love, asking whether the time and energy one must exhaust for a little something on the side is worth it.
David Jenkins

Here (and above) is the trailer.