Bertrand Blier‘s film Going Places (1974) is vile. His Get Out Your Handkerchiefs, from 1978, is better; it’s merely obtuse and somewhat offensive, with some lousy characterization. Gerard Depardieu stars as a man who cannot understand his depressed wife, Solange. A comedy, the movie at least tells us something about the constant effort to find hope (even through listening to Mozart), but it conveys another message as well: that women are inexplicable and generally weak.

Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere are fine actors. Carole Laure is okay but nothing more as the often naked Solange. On the subject of male-female relationships Handkerchiefs is poor. Thus it is a pretty poor film.

(In French with English subtitles)

I heard on the radio an old, hedonistic Katy Perry song, “Last Friday Night” (2010), which deals with a night of debauchery, and of course drinking is included.

“I smell like a minibar,” the singer sings. Does the girl in this song have a boyfriend, and if so, is he disappointed? I would think that any lass who contentedly admits she smells like a minibar would provoke a boyfriend to say, I sure can pick ’em.

Cover of The Story of Qiu Ju

Unlike his other major films of the Nineties, Zhang Yimou‘s The Story of Qiu Ju (1993) is set in contemporary China and is thus not a period piece.  It is, however, a film that enables him once again to censure authoritarianism (read Communism) while unassumingly focusing on other subjects and themes as well.  The elusiveness of justice, the problem of persistence without thought, the alien nature of the big city to a rural denizen—these are the most important themes.  The struggle to win an official apology is Qiu Ju‘s subject.  The struggle is undertaken by a pregnant peasant woman (Gong Li), and the movie ends sadly enough to further buttress Zhang’s vision.

(In Mandarin with English subtitles)

Cover of The Story of Qiu Ju

Unlike his other major films of the Nineties, Zhang Yimou‘s The Story of Qiu Ju (1993) is set in contemporary China and is thus not a period piece.  It is, however, a film that enables him once again to censure authoritarianism (read Communism) while unassumingly focusing on other subjects and themes as well.  The elusiveness of justice, the problem of persistence without thought, the alien nature of the big city to a rural denizen—these are the most important themes.  The struggle to win an official apology is Qiu Ju‘s subject.  The struggle is undertaken by a pregnant peasant woman (Gong Li), and the movie ends sadly enough to further buttress Zhang’s vision.

(In Mandarin with English subtitles)

A very satisfying fiction is Bernard Malamud‘s story, “Idiots First,” a fast-moving, tough-minded achievement. Nobody does desperation better than Malamud as he describes the doings of a dying elderly man trying to acquire enough money to send his mentally impaired son to the son’s uncle.

The story is dark but not at all despairing. A ray of light is tossed in when a lurking grim reaper (he is supernatural and hangs around the elderly man) proves he is something more than a creature of “awful wrath.” It brings some mild relief; “Idiots First” brings fascination.