Cover of Alice Adams

Alice Adams (1935), directed by George Stevens, is about unambitious husbands, vexed, money-emphasizing wives and optimistic girls with an instinct for social climbing.  The tone isn’t properly fixed, but Katharine Hepburn is fetchingly youthful as the optimistic girl, Alice Adams.  Stevens’s directing is fine, although since AA was released as a silent film in 1923, one is justified in asking should it have been remade had Hepburn’s celebrated performance not been an element here.

A French Catholic writer named Julian Green wrote a novel, set in America, about an evangelical young man who sees Catholics as idolaters.  He is also too puritanical for his own intellectual and perhaps spiritual good (he believes his friend David, a sturdy Christian, is engaged to be married so he can fulfill the lusts of the flesh).  But the young man, Joseph Day by name, has a problem with his own flesh.

The novel is Moira (1951), and the title character is the beguiling daughter of Joseph’s landlady.  Though she has but a small part in the book, Moira represents for Joseph the temptation to sex just as a fellow student called Praileau—Joseph goes to a university—represents the temptation to violence, to physical conflict.  Joseph is a Christian who is building his house not on a rock but on sand.

A peculiar, straightforwardly written novel, Moira is more interesting than artistically successful.  The climax doesn’t come off, and it looks like the character of Joseph is going to be sufficiently worked out but it really isn’t.  Religious feeling exists in the book, and it is occasionally funny, but Green wanted too much to write a disturbing tragedy, however Christian.

Written and directed by Mia Hansen-Love, Goodbye First Love (2012), from France, should have been titled by the U.S. “Young Love” (the correct translation of the French title).  But at least it was distributed to the U.S., for it’s a good film.

Fifteen-year-old Camille, played by Lola Creton, is (I’m sorry to say) well acquainted with sex, although she genuinely loves her boyfriend-bedmate, Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky).  He loves her too, or thinks he does, but he goes on an eight-month trip to South America and admits in a letter to Camille that he’s been kissing some girls.  Camille slowly gives up on him.  —Is there love on Sullivan’s part?—  Now older, the girl becomes involved with her architecture instructor, eventually two-timing him, though, after she runs into Sullivan.  The two get together (and get naked) since Camille still loves the young man.  And Sullivan declares his love for Camille, and yet . . .

About these relationships questions are raised.  Whether or not there is love on Sullivan’s part, there is more to his liaison with Camille than sex.  But how much more?  And what is the more?  It seems Camille, for her part, moves from being a lover-in-love (with Sullivan) to being . . . what?  Just a plain lover?

Goodbye First Love does not have the power of such contemporary French films as The Dreamlife of Angels or Skirt Day, but it is personal and lyrical and fresh in its details.  Unlike Clair and Truffaut and Rohmer, Hansen-Love lacks an original style, but this will not prevent her from becoming an important director-scenarist if she persists in fulfilling her promise.  She is pleasingly gifted with both form and content.

(In French with English subtitles)

Catchy or not, are the songs in the 2016 movie musical, La La Land, interesting?  I would say yes, almost all of them are—and they’re catchy besides.  Which means they are pretty good, contrary to what some of the critics think.

Well directed by Damien Chazelle, the movie’s story nevertheless should have been better, not so dull and flimsy.  (Why does Mia believe her one-woman show will be a success?)  Until the climax, Chazelle stops taking chances with his song-and-dance numbers in order to let this bland story flow.  What’s more, I don’t always like the film’s dim lighting.  I do like the acting of Ryan Gosling and, especially, Emma Stone, though.  Gosling is solid, Stone is marvelously solid.

Go see La La Land for the music and the acting.

Cover of Metropolitan – Criterion Collection

The characters in Whit Stillman‘s first film, Metropolitan (1990), are socially adept preppies (is that redundant?) who prove how much they’ve learned from and delighted in the prodigious world of ideas.  Politics, social decline, literature, their own generation—all these are discussed as extensively as the bright boys and girls can manage it.  Religion is, too, though not much.  Nobody is living religion any more than he or she is living anything else, members of the “untitled aristocracy” as they are, except for Tom, who tries to abide by the moral principles of socialism as he sees them.  A certain stagnation prevails.

The social scene is all most of these people have for sustenance.  If the world of ideas is having any influence at all, it must be on sensitive Audrey, lover of Jane Austen and Mansfield Park, who may be imitating Mansfield‘s Fanny Price by affectionately longing for socialist Tom the way Fanny affectionately longs for Edmund.  And perhaps it is significant that the man Fanny loves is a clergyman whereas the one Audrey loves is in truth not even much good at abiding by socialism’s moral principles.

But at least Audrey wants love for sustenance, as do the other girls in the film, eventually.  For all the stagnation, change is as inevitable in these preppies’ lives as it is in The Cherry Orchard, and who knows?  Maybe religion is around the corner.  Nobody knows just where the language of theology and morality will take a person.  In one particularly funny scene, someone calls a handsome chap named Nick a hypocrite for sleeping with a slut (to find out why he is called this, you’ll have to see the film) to which Nick responds, “It’s not hypocrisy . . . it’s sin.”  And although the slut, Cynthia by name, immediately and confidently murmurs, “It’s hardly that,” the peculiar statement remains in the air, its weight undeniable.  When it isn’t fatuous, language here does have weight, not least because it is witty.  And, yes, fatuity gets spoken, as it does by all of us, but intellects here are not fully cultivated, not completely mature.  Will they mature?  What is this maturity?  How likely the members of an untitled aristocracy are to find out I don’t know.