In Robert Bresson‘s first feature film, Angels of Sin (1943), which I saw on YouTube, righteous behavior intersects with the worldly behavior of a desperate soul.  Here, a zealous young nun, Anne-Marie (Renee Faure), tries to Christianly love a female ex-con (Jany Holt) taking refuge in Anne-Marie’s convent.  Unknown to the convent sisters, she is there after having committed a murder.

Less oddly directed than Bresson’s later films, Angels is also less spiritually vivid and resonant, and is far from first-rate.  It is a serious picture, though, and does well in showing the distinctive lives of nuns.  To my mind, frankly, it is about the impossibility of saintliness (but not sacrifice), albeit we also infer from it that the devout life is a good life.

(In French with English subtitles)

Poster for ”La Règle du jeu, directed by Jean Renoir (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the late 1930s, film artist Jean Renoir was not happy with French society, which he exposed in La Regle du jeu (1939)—The Rules of the Game—as unserious and self-seeking and infernally adulterous.  Curiously, class distinctions take a step back (both Christine and her chambermaid cheat on their husbands), but the camaraderie we see is usually limited to one’s own class.  And yet this camaraderie, such as that between Christine and Genevieve de Marras, quickly departs, and certainly without it, there is mayhem.

For all this, The Rules of the Game is a “pleasant” movie (Renoir’s word, translated); it is pronouncedly comical.  It is a classic, made so partly by some excellent acting.  Marcel Dalio, for example, looks right as the Marquis Robert, but is also unerring with the character’s casual decadence and tired vigor.  Mila Parely, another example, cleverly plays Genevieve, the marquis’s mistress, displaying a range of emotion as admirable as her poise.  But why was Rules Renoir’s last great film?

(In French with English subtitles)

Would that Woody Allen were a major film artist.  It would be good to have some artistically successful American comedies about how we live now, and that is not what Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, from 1986, is.

To begin with, it takes a long time for any of the movie’s humor to make us laugh (to make ME laugh, anyway, but I can’t imagine anyone finding the first 45 minutes of this film funny).  Further, Allen is pathetically sloppy at writing dialogue, which is often thin and banal.  And not all of the acting is good:  Mia Farrow and Max von Sydow are dull, Allen himself dreadful.  Finally, the film, though a comedy, is unpersuasively and even ludicrously optimistic.  Michael Caine stops obsessing over and pursuing Barbara Hershey, and an infertile Allen actually impregnates Dianne Wiest! 

Hannah and Her Sisters (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Dark Blue World (2001) is a Czech World War II film with a nifty story and well-known themes.  The dramatis personae includes Franta, a Czech pilot imprisoned by the Communists of his homeland because he fought German aircraft for the RAF and is now feared to be dangerously pro-freedom.

Flashbacks to the Forties exhibit Franta and his best friend Karel leaving Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia for England in order to join the British armed services, and after a number of months they and other Czech pilots are allowed to fly missions.  One of them leads to Karel having to bail out of his plane and meeting an English lady whose soldier husband has been missing in action for a year.  Karel, liking her, puts the moves on Susan, the lady, but she is unattracted to him.  As it happens, she wishes to ease her loneliness with nice Franta, who, though he knows of Karel’s love for Susan, acquiesces.  The missing husband is forgotten.

What all this means is that Franta mistreats his best friend even after Karel valiantly saves Franta’s life in an air battle.  When the truth about Franta and Susan becomes known, the friendship dies; Karel is unforgiving.  There is, though, an instance of magnanimity which I must be sufficiently decent not to disclose.  After the war Franta, the lost soul, returns to a different Czechoslovakia.  It appears the pilot’s purgatory is right around the corner since he suffers in a Communist prison.  1951 is when Czech pilots like Franta were set free from the prisons, although the film tells us they perforce lived as outcasts.  In truth, Dark Blue World honors them.

The movie was directed by Jan Sverak and written by Zdenek Sverak.  Ondrej Vetchy, as Franta, is capable of force but has an easy manner.  Krystof Hadek displays boyish anger and purity of heart as Karel.  With now womanly good looks Tara Fitzgerald (Susan) is compellingly grave and as English as they come.

Dark Blue World (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The French Amelie (2000), a monster hit in the country of its origin, is as offputting as it is enchanting.  Winsome Audrey Tautou enacts an intensely shy, peculiar do-gooder of sorts who falls hard for a solitary fellow employed at a porn shop.

“Am I the only one who finds Amelie [the do-gooder] just a tad creepy?” asks critic Charles Taylor.  No, I do too.  I find the entire movie a tad creepy, for all its visual vivacity.  Should we expect anything different from a film whose treatment of sex is contemptibly cheap, a romp without consequences?  For one thing, even the porn shop receives a friendly nod from director Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

Cover of Amelie