Rene Clair‘s 1931 film, A Nous la Liberte, ends (almost) with a comically ironic look at the replacement of man with machine in the factory—before it was known that society would weather this storm—and it induces us to wonder how relevant this matter is to our own time.  In any case, what is actually central to the film is that an escaped convict, Louis (Raymond Cordy), is hungry for freedom but, after becoming a wealthy manufacturer, leads other men into forms of captivity.  He means no harm, though, and finally he loses his business and is free only in the way he was after escaping from prison.  He hits the open road.

Liberte is such a weird little flick it is not exactly my favorite Rene Clair.  Again, statements are put to music and the plot is bulging.  It is as artificial as it is satirical (more so).  But uniqueness is uniqueness; Clair is cannily and charmingly daring.  And Liberte does succeed at making you think.

(In French with English subtitles)

Much of the dialogue in Nicholas Stoller’s The Five Year Engagement (2012) is strictly for adolescents.  It’s childishly raunchy.  Also, it’s a movie other people have found funnier than I have.

And yet . . . it’s not bad.

Tom (Jason Segel), a chef, and Violet (Emily Blunt), a psychology grad student, are forced into a five-year engagement–as they incur various problems–after Tom proposes marriage.  Besides some agreeable details in the script (by Stoller and Segel), what interests us is that this is one romantic comedy that takes romantic love seriously.  Such love truly exists between Tom and Violet, and the chemistry between Segel and Blunt is palpably good.  Blunt, by the way, is excellent; Segel passable.

The writing doesn’t always hold up, as when Tom all but loses it over Violet’s admission that a psych professor forced a kiss on her one night.  But Engagement, smutty as it is, has its charms.  And it has quite a cast–hooray for Alison Brie, but let’s see more David Paymer, please.

NEW YORK, NY - APRIL 18: Actor Jason Segel walks the red carpet at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival at the Ziegfeld Theatre on April 18, 2012 in New York City. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Cover of Monsieur Vincent

The year is 1617, and a new priest, Vincent de Paul, arrives in a French town which has had no priest for a long time.

It shows.  One of the themes of the 1947 biopic, Monsieur Vincent, is the demanding struggle of the clergyman to tame the unchurched, the brutish, the shallow.  Father Vincent’s first stop in the little town is the filthy, abandoned local church, an enormous hovel with cobwebs.  Many, not all, of the townspeople are dirt poor, and Vincent, formerly a priest in Paris, wishes to live with and help them.  At first they are also sorely afraid of a nonexistent plague.  The sequence in which Vincent holds a funeral service for a woman thought to have had the plague, while a crowd of reluctant people walks up and starts crossing themselves, points up a European Catholicism still perfectly imperishable, of course, in the seventeenth century.  Director Maurice Cloche handles this scene, and all the other scenes, as he ought to have.

The best handling is by the playwright Jean Anouilh, who wrote the script, purveying such other themes as the question of what to devote one’s life to and the rich’s responsibility, if any, to the poor.  With flair Pierre Fresnay enacts Vincent, and the good costumes make us wish the film was in color.  All in all, a worthy motion picture.

(In French with English subtitles)

Spring Breakdown (2010), by Melody Carlson, is one of the short books in a series, for young adults, about six teenaged girls.  As a brief summary inside the book puts it:  “The wealthy fashion students in Mrs. Carter’s boardinghouse spend a quiet spring break in Florida until . . .”  Well, until spring breakdown hits.  Fun time is over.

The girls are typical teenagers except that two or three of them are Christians, among them DJ and Taylor.  Like the unsaved girls (and lover-boys), these two have their faults, albeit for Taylor one of them isn’t boozing now that she is a spiritually delivered ex-alcoholic.  THIS isn’t ordinary, but all kinds of ordinary incidents roll into this little bailiwick.  The only bailiwick the girls know, it is a mixed bag of the mundane and the fleshly.  There is a Rockabilly dance.  DJ and Taylor do some harmless skinny dipping at night.  Two other girls, Eliza and Casey, get drunk after a bumpy photo shoot.  There are, however, some spiritual and emotional challenges for DJ (the main character) pushing to the side all the kids-will-be-kids occurrences.

Carlson’s prose is imperfect—for one thing, she keeps misusing “hopefully”—but her narrative is entertaining and her dialogue is serviceable.  It’s a Christian book, but not a preachy one.  And it’s meant to appeal to a broad audience.  I would rather see devout teens reading Spring Breakdown than buying a fundamentally insignificant Adele or Beyoncé CD.