The Rare Review

Movies, books, music and TV

Searing And Meaningful: “Gabrielle”

On Gabrielle (2006):

From France, this Patrice Chereau picture borrows Joseph Conrad’s fine 1897 story, “The Return,” for cinematic treatment.  A wife, Gabrielle, leaves her home to run off with a recent lover, but abruptly changes her mind and returns to her husband.  It does Jean the spouse no good at all.  Self-confidence goes; the expected confusion and wrath arrive.  The film has to do with desiccated lives and not merely a desiccated marriage.  What happens when marriage is the only thing a person can fall back on?  Nothing.

Isabelle Huppert plays Gabrielle in a performance perfect and great: the core of a person, of a broken aristocrat, is captured.  Equally powerful, emotionally wrenching, is Pascal Greggory as Jean.  The actors are superior to the director’s style, what with the occasional unnecessary music and the transitions from color to black-and-white.  Even worse are the arty intertitles.  But Gabrielle is no letdown, searing and meaningful as it is.  Huppert and Greggory are not its only strengths.

(In French with English subtitles)

Cover of "Gabrielle"

Cover of Gabrielle

Nice Is “The Good Fairy”

 

Cover of "The Good Fairy"

Cover of The Good Fairy

Ferenc Molnar probably wrote a delightful play when he wrote The Good Fairy, since it was turned into a delightful 1935 movie by William Wyler.  With cool subtlety Margaret Sullavan (once married to Wyler) enacts a friendly, callow girl raised in an orphanage and encouraged there to practice good deeds.  She does one, willy-nilly, for a professional man (Herbert Marshall), a lawyer whose integrity is sadly losing him money.  But to accomplish this, Sullavan’s “good fairy” has to lie to a love-hungry CEO (Frank Morgan), who is generous enough to bestow wealth on the man he believes to be Sullavan’s husband—the lawyer.

Both men are needy in their own way, albeit Sullavan, or Luisa Ginglebuscher (her character’s name), can help only one of them.  The CEO is privileged regardless, and it impresses that the film does something many modern-age people would disdain.  It looks through a positive lens at “men of privilege.”  Yes, the lawyer is poor but, as an educated man, he could gain privilege—and wealth—at any time.  And he does.

A true artist, Preston Sturges, wrote the screenplay for Fairy, and even though it isn’t one of his “personal” works, no doubt he understood what Molnar was doing.

“Klute” Is No Bore With A Whore

Tough-minded Klute (1971), directed by Alan J. Pakula, is one of those urban film dramas of the Seventies, working better than most of what Scorsese and Lumet did at this time. There is a psychological focus on the prostitute Bree, enacted by Jane Fonda, who is nothing short of great, of course. Her Bree is bright and borderline sassy and professionally nice, and corrupt. She never wants her self-confidence to slip. Thanks to Fonda, we believe she aspires to become an actress. We see how a small-town detective like John Klute could fall in love with her. Klute is played by Donald Sutherland, in too subdued a fashion.

An artistic thriller, Klute loses some plausibility in its last 25 minutes. It is worthwhile, even so, blessed with capital performances by Charles Cioffi and Roy Scheider. And with Michael Small’s chilling music.

Silly Dr. Massarel: “An Affair of State”

A doctor, Massarel, living in a town called Canneville represents, in Guy de Maupassant‘s short story “An Affair of State,” the political radical whom events make gleeful. Post-Napoleonic France will again be a republic! In fact, Massarel is prompted to call a couple of his patients “stupid” when they interfere with his activist activity.

But the doctor is in the midst of “listless villagers.” They couldn’t care less about France becoming a republic. For them, affairs of state are not affairs of the heart—or of the ailing body. The Canneville mayor and, apparently, the curate support the Regime. The radical’s enthusiasms are not the enthusiasms of others. Maupassant shakes his head over the fanatical partisan, blind to opposing positions, in this wonderful, even amusing story.

“The Trial of Joan of Arc” And Its Terrible Fire

As evidenced by Robert Bresson‘s 1962 Joan of Arc film, The Trial of Joan of Arc, the actual interrogation and testimony of Joan are fascinating in what is an always harrowing story. It makes the Church look bad while Joan is an enduring but also vulnerable Christian. Florence Delay, slight and not unattractive, does not really act in the part of Joan, but has been directed by Bresson for his purposes. This is par for the course. With its threatening air and spare power, this is, I believe, one of Bresson’s best pictures. Currently available on Max.

(In French with English subtitles, and in English)

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