889 posts categorized "Women's Cinema"

July 05, 2025

THE PIANO TECHER — THE CRITERION COLLECTION

 Jo JoWelcome!

Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does.

Punk heart still beating.

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ColeSmithey.comMichael Haneke skillfully adapts fellow Austrian, and Nobel Prize winner, Elfriede Jelinek's 1983 autobiographical novel into a deeply insightful film about the lasting results of physical and emotional trauma as explored through Isabelle Huppert's Erika Kohut character.

Erika only ever has trouble in mind. Familial exploitation has been a constant presence in her life. Her father died in a mental institution.

Elfriede Jelinek's transgressive narrative is set in Austria where an ongoing abusive relationship between Erika and her live-in mother (Annie Girardot) plays out in brutal fashion.

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Mother and daughter sleep in the same adjacent beds where the now absent father once slept, even though Erika has a room of her own.

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The mother destroys colorful clothing that Erika purchases but rarely if ever wears. The women engage in knock-down-drag-out fights that end in hugs and apologies.

Nothing functional, normal, or peaceful can exist in their fraught relationship.

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Her mother says, "That's just how we are. We're a hot-blooded family."

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Erika teaches classical piano in private lessons at the Viennese conservatory where she lords her thorough classical musical knowledge over her young students with cold hostility. Erika sternly follows her mother's command that she never allow any of her students to surpass her talent.

Equal parts sadist and masochist, Erika is a perv on the prowl. Her mastery of classical piano goes hand in hand with her extreme desire for sexual perversity.

One very telling scene, in which Erika instructs Walter at the piano, involves her pointing out all of the different musical notations that give breath, nuance, and complexity to the Classical piece at hand. With verbal cues Erika precisely guides Walter's fingertips via his intellect to exert the exact amount of pressure that she so deeply desires.

This is magnificent filmmaking on full display.

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Erika goes to peep shows where she smells, if not licks, cum-soaked tissues left behind by past male visitors. Erika frequents drive-in movies where she stalks young lovers having sex in cars that she squats beside to urinate while masturbating. Self-annihilation is her ultimate goal. Humiliation is a ritual.

Romantic love as a social construct doesn't exist, pain and humiliation must attend any sensual encounter.

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Erika is also a cutter.

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Enter Walter (Benoît Magimel), a clean-cut college engineering student with an innate talent for classical piano. Walter is drawn to Erika like a moth to flame. Little does Walter realize that he has set foot in a spider's web.

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Handsome, polite, intelligent, and articulate, Walter boxes outside his weight class with Erika by a good 20 years. Walter's simplistic idea of love is leagues away from Erika's desired sexual set pieces.

This is the romance Erika has been waiting for. However much Erika is able to handle Walter's immediate sexual needs, he cannot return the favor when it comes to Erika's perverse proclivities, however dirty, desperate, or exhibitionist they may be in practice.

ColeSmithey.com

"The Piano Teacher" is a stunning work of transgressive filmic art for its rigorous attention to the complex psychologies of its characters. Ego and id, desire and need, rules and anarchy, stupidity and intelligence, creation and destruction, all explode at once in a flash of willfully exposed degradation.

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Isabelle Huppert and Benoît Magimel deliver performances of a lifetime.

I know of no other movie that begins to capture the depth of emotional truths that Hanake's adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek's novel, affords the viewer.

Michael Hanake is the anti-Quentin Tarantino. Both filmmakers author their movies. "The Piano Teacher" is the only time that Haneke didn't write his own script.

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Michael Hanake views violence in movies as pornography. Rather, Hanake utilizes obscenity as a dramatic and satirical tool equally valuable to John Cassavetes's soul-bearing approach to characters and situations.

The sex that occurs in this film exerts an undeniable erotic power. Hanake allows human eroticism to exist in scenes that play out in real time. Their semi-public places add inherent suspense. Your guts get involved.

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A modern-day Pasolini, Michael Haneke rigorously attends to the molecules of narrative that enable vibrant drama to freely breed under his magnificent actors' attentive care.

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Although he is retired, Michael Haneke's films remain a beacon of hope in Cinema. Here is a true filmic poet with wisdom and insights that become crystal clear through his provocative and controversial films.

"The Piano Teacher" is one of Michael Haneke's greatest achievements. It is one of the few movies that dares to delve beneath the surface of BDSM psychology.

Rated R. 131 mins.

5 Stars

Cozy Cole

ColeSmithey.com

June 27, 2025

BEYOND THE GAZE: JULE CAMPBELL'S SWIMSUIT ISSUE

 Jo JoWelcome!

Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does.

Punk heart still beating.

This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel.

Get cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon.

Thanks a lot acorns!

Your kind generosity keeps the reviews coming!

Cheers!

ColeSmithey.com

 

ColeSmithey.comJule Campbell's daughter Jill directs a loving memoir documentary that gives first-person voice to the editorial, personal, and political challenges that Jule overcame in her role as editor for Sports Illustrated's popular annual Swimsuit issue in a magazine publishing career that spanned 32 years.

The pettiness of human nature is on full display in the high stakes magazine publishing world, from both sexes (writ large).

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Capitalizing on beauty is as old as humanity. Celebrating female beauty is something to be cherished and respected, especially when handled with Jule Campbell's delicate artistic sense of editorial care.

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Unpacking layers of social subtext between the film's ongoing dialogue between mother and daughter, model subject and photographer, media and audience, is part of the joy of watching it.

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"Beyond The Gaze: Jule Campbell's Swimsuit Issue" won't do much toward bridging the us-against-them-sexes-battle mindset of the American public circa 2025, but it achieves its goals as a cinematic character study of a photographic and social maverick.

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Jule Campbell's female gaze had a humanitarian purity about it. This doc has more than a few lessons of editorial wisdom to impart to its audience.

Establishing trust is always the first step toward any form of fruitful communication.

Not Rated. 107 mins.

3 Stars

Cozy Cole

ColeSmithey.com

June 08, 2025

FRIENDSHIP

 Jo JoWelcome!

Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does.

Punk heart still beating.

This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel.

Get cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon.

Thanks a lot acorns!

Your kind generosity keeps the reviews coming!

Cheers!

ColeSmithey.com

 

ColeSmithey.comAs grotesque social satires go, "Friendship" doesn't hold a candle to last year's "The Substance."

Writer/director Andrew De Young makes the leap from television to cinema with less than you might hope for in his feature film debut.

Set in a fictional (Midwest) suburb city named Clovis, TV weatherman Austin (Paul Rudd - also executive producing) gets a wrong-address package assist from his neighbor Craig (Tim Robinson).

An all-too-quick friendship develops with both men underestimating the dangers of problematic influence that each man possess.

Craig is on the spectrum, big time. He only wears ugly oversized beige clothing from the same store. Craig's occupation is as a programmer tasked with weaponizing data to control people. You wouldn't call Craig a very well socialized human being.

Indeed, there is no social event that Craig won't ruin if given a chance.

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At work, Craig insists on filling his coffee mug all the way to the brim before walking past busy co-workers with the speed of a sloth.

OCD all the way baby.

Tim Robinson's performance is just about as creepy as creepy gets.

Now, I never need to see him again.

But there's more to it than that. Craig is a narcissist par excellence. He's a bad omen, capable of inflicting great harm on those around him. Craig also has a proclivity for crime.

Craig's cancer-surviving wife Tami (Kate Mara) barely stands a chance.

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Austin, on the other hand is a hard working news broadcaster. Austin even fronts a band of cool middle-aged local musicians who perform at their neighborhood bar.

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Still, Austin has his own potential for exerting bad influence, as when he takes Craig on a long, winding tour of a sewer that leads inside City Hall's corridors of powers during the dark of night, an experience that will come back to bite both men.

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"Friendship" doesn't add up as a complete narrative due to its lack of an empathetic protagonist. Craig is too cringy to be an anti-hero. Austin is just another of Craig's ostensibly long list of victims.

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That leaves Kate Mara's Tami to carry the movie on her shoulders. For a moment it seems that Tami will make the crisis decision that she verbally promises but then reneges on without comment. 

"Friendship" is a feel-bad movie that never manages to make a viable point. The movie never hits the black comic goal that it seems to target. A character would have to perish for that to happen.

If you're looking for a cogent thesis on the current state of strained friendships between men of social class in America, you won't find it here.

ColeSmithey.com

The movie's overriding theme could well be that spectrum narcissists are the new real-life villains making the world hell for the rest of us.

Don't go mushroom hunting with them, or anyone else for that matter really.

Rated R. 100 mins.

2 Stars

Cozy Cole

ColeSmithey.com

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