IN PRAISE OF LOVE — CANNES 2001

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French New Wave Cinema standard bearer Jean-Luc Godard's 2001 study in inventive filmic expression carries significant weight.

Godard refracts historic, personal, and editorial messaging through pure cinematic poetry.

The narrative involves a filmmaker navigating his current documentary navigating his current project while recovering emotionally after the break-up of a 10-year relationship.

A shift from black-and-white to color has a profound effect on the audience.

Godard's kaleidoscopic approach to storytelling is refreshing for his willingness to to make political statements big and small.

Jean-Luc Godard takes a steely knife to Stephen Spielberg, who he detests with an obvious fury.

Love isn't all that Godard is praising.

Hollywood and Americans represent people who refuse to ever become adults.

"In Praise of Love" could easily serve as a permanent installment at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I screened this beautiful film in its truly amazing 4K restoration, kicking off the L’Alliance New York's Version restaurée series, held at the lovely Florence Gould Theater in Midtown Manhattan.

Check it out.

The every-Tuesday night series runs Tuesday, September 10, 2024 - Tuesday, December 17, 2024.

Rated PG. 97 mins.

KINDS OF KINDNESS — CANNES 2024

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Theater of Cruelty

Yorgos Lanthamos Regresses

By Cole Smithey

Since going mainstream with the shockingly delightful "Poor Things," the heir-apparent to such Cinema heavyweights as Michael Haneke, Peter Greenaway, David Cronenberg, and David Lynch, serves up a half-baked mess.

Unintelligible.

Greek avant-garde filmmaker Yorgos Lanthamos re-teams with regular co-writer Efthimis Filippou to create a triptych of stories, each one more morose than the last.

It's the same poorly articulated breed of satire that hobbled other Lanthamos/Filippou projects — see, or rather don't see: "Dogtooth," "Alps," "The Lobster," and "The Killing of a Sacred Deer."

Here is feel-bad Cinema for the masses.

Pointless misery.

Eat up babies.

In "Kinds of Kindness," the viewer is left to their own devices to extrapolate on narcissist bosses, trigger-happy cops, group sex with friends, health cults, and, well yes, cannibalism. Rape and incest also get the Lanthamos spotlight.

If you are going to punish your audience, there ought to be a good reason for it. You will find no such purpose in "Kinds of Kindness" unless you are willing to put yourself through days of mental gymnastics.

The concept for the movie seems to spring from the Annie Lennox/Dave Stewart song "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)," that introduces the movie.

BDS&M misery.

It is telling that Lanthamos's most successful film "Poor Things" was written by other writers, namely Tony McNamara and Alasdair Gray.

Telling too, is Filippou's explanation of "Kinds of Kindness."

"Our main concern is to observe people, behaviors, clothes, and reactions and create a story that relates to something almost real and relatively believable."

How vague can you get?

I dare say that this particular approach will never lead to the narrative heights that David Lynch reached with "Blue Velvet" or "Mulholland Drive," much less Lars von Trier's challenging high-wire act.

Lanthamos flagrantly disregards one of Cinema's strongest precepts, namely that the filmmaker is responsible for sustaining an audience's trust. One reason that Alfred Hitchcock's movies are so good is due to the way Hitch treats his audience. You know that you are in capable hands.

If he were a doctor, Yorgos Lanthamos might, for example, want to amputate your thumb just to see your reaction. Fun for him perhaps, but not for you.

Rated R. 164 mins.ZERO STARS

SCORPIO RISING — CLASSIC FILM PICK

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In 1963, experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger released “Scorpio Rising,” a groundbreaking 30-minute revelry of fetishized homoerotic iconography set against a soundtrack of unlicensed pop songs from the likes of Ricky Nelson and Ray Charles. The rebellious effect of Anger’s dynamic musical counterpoint creates a bold sense of romanticized rock ‘n’ roll nostalgia that informed later filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese (see “Mean Streets”).

Anger’s mobile moving camera fawns over the clothes and boots of a black-haired motorcycle enthusiast who patterns his macho style on Marlon Brando’s Johnny Strabler character from “The Wild One” and James Dean in “Rebel Without a Cause.” With long sideburns, slicked back hair, and a cigarette dangling from his lips here is a brother to the hot rod kids of the ‘50s who picked up where their soldier fathers left off, creating cool cars from cheap parts easily found in junkyards.

The muscled young man slaves over putting together a “show-bike” motorcycle that sits in pieces in his garage. Little Peggy March’s rarely heard love song “Wind-Up Doll” plays as the audience is left to contemplate the significance of a human skull that sits inside a shroud that hovers over the mechanic and his bike. Implied is the motorcycle rider’s constant awareness of the danger that the blissful act of riding his carefully maintained bike presents. An intercut sequence shows a prepubescent version of the boy playing with wind-up tin motorcycle toys.

David Lynch might never have thought to make “Blue Velvet” had he not been inspired by a sequence in which the haunting Bobby Vinton song plays over a lithe biker buckling his pants and putting on a black T-shirt. The fetishized nature of the scene is heightened. The biker methodically puts on his festooned black leather hat, jacket, and chain belt in preparation for a ride that will take him to a party of his gay peers. 

Anger intercuts clips from a Sunday school educational film (“The Last Journey to Jerusalem”) that was accidentally delivered to his front door. Cutting between black-and-white shots of Jesus and his disciples entering a building with bikers going into a private sex club adds an undercurrent of sardonic commentary. Evocatively transgressive and subversively poetic, “Scorpio Rising” is a cinematic rebel yell against the fiercely anti-gay hypocrisies of American culture that still dog society in the 21st century.

Having grown up in Beverly Hills with a love of all things Hollywood, as fostered by his well-to-do grandmother, Kenneth Anger (nee Anglemyer) began experimenting with filmmaking at an early age. At 19 he made his first film “Fireworks,” about a midnight reverie involving a group of sailors. He was subsequently arrested on obscenity charges and the film became the subject of a California Supreme Court obscenity trial that ruled the film to be “art.” “Scorpio Rising” suffered the same fate, but this time the court’s decision represented “a landmark case of redeeming social merit.”

Not Rated. 28 mins.