Did Pedro Damian die as a brave man or as a coward?  Jorge Luis Borges‘s short story, “The Other Death,” centers on this question.  That the story makes us wonder what the suppression of the past, if it were possible, would mean and adverts to the foretold “birth of God” proves how expansive it is.  Philosophical the tale is, but on another level it reminds us of the perennial importance of war to the minds of men who have fought.

Another Borges story, “The Dead Man,” entertainingly resembles a Western.  In it, a narrator with incomplete knowledge gives an account of the life of a hoodlum in the late 1800s.  The young man’s “only recommendation was his infatuation with courage.”  In the long run, it’s an infatuation that doesn’t matter.  The young man ends up dead and the narrator, as he indicates, must later correct and expand the story he is telling.  The hoodlum is, as it were, lost to us.  But very possibly he met his death with the courage so esteemed by the great Argentine writer, Borges.

I have never read Dostoyevsky’s novella, “A Gentle Spirit,” but several times have I seen the French film Robert Bresson made from it.  A characteristically sober achievement, Une Femme Douce (A Gentle Woman, 1969) concerns the death of a soul-possessing being, i.e. a human being (Dominique Sanda).  Unable to meet the requirements of marital love, she commits suicide. . . In the Catholic Bresson’s universe, is she saved?  In my view, she is essentially no different from Mouchette in Mouchette (Bresson’s previous film); so, yes, she is saved in tragic death.

I disagree with those who object that Femme needs a stronger spiritual dimension, although I do think it should be a more engaging depiction of a marriage.  But then there’s the unforgettably filmed climax and denouement, with bold, wise closeups of Sanda and of her casket, etc.

(In French with English subtitles)

Young and Beautiful is a palatable 2013 film by the French director-writer Francois Ozon.

Seventeen-year-old Isabelle (Marine Vacth) loses her virginity to a German boy, sans any love for him, and then begins to offer sex for money.  Learning about this understandably drives her mother up a wall; of course Isabelle is forced to visit a therapist, but the sad truth is that the girl is a prostitute because she wants to be a prostitute.  At length, however, she moves beyond naked sex in the interest of finding a person to genuinely love.

Lucid, nicely photographed and inevitably erotic, Ozon’s movie strongly implies that it no longer means anything for art to be transgressive.  What is transgressive is people’s behavior, which always means something.  What it means ultimately is up to the artist as he or she tries to establish a theme or themes.  Ozon is equipped for this, and in Jeune et Jolie (the French title) he has a better film, I believe, than Under the Sand and Swimming Pool.  He has an intelligent film.

There is a shelter in Gimme Shelter (2014), a film by Ronald Krauss based (here we go again) on a true story.  The shelter is the suburban house of one Kathy DiFiore (Anne Dowd) transformed into a refuge-home for pregnant teenage girls.  One of these girls is truculent, misery-laden Apple (Vanessa Hudgens), who can’t make it with either her damaged mom or her rich, uncertain dad married to a sometimes insensitive woman.  A friendly priest (James Earl Jones) who calls the shelter his church helps and even softens Apple before she gives birth to the tiny tot she refused to abort.

Despite certain pieties in the film, despite a spirit of Christian morality, Apple does not become a votary.  She does self-improve.  Parts of Krauss’s script are feeble, but usually Gimme Shelter is gritty and compelling.  It has a lot to do, it seems, with the impulsiveness and mysteriousness of human actions.  Moreover the cast, including Hudgens, is strong and true.  It’s curious, though, that rebellious Apple is a nonsmoker.

English: Actress and Singer Vanessa Hudgens In May 28, 2010 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the movie Cul-de-Sac (1966), an armed gangster takes his wounded companion to a very old castle where a man and his wife live.  The gangster demands compliance, getting it from the man, the homeowner (poorly played by Donald Pleasance), who is a ludicrous coward.

Neither the premise nor the story in this Roman Polanski undertaking is very good.  The film is a tragicomic noirish entertainment, and although there are some clever touches—as when Pleasance’s George playfully dons his wife’s nightgown—the piece is unconvincing and rather coarse.  Knife in the Water it ain’t.

One of the few pleasant things about it, frankly, is the beautiful nudity of actress Francoise Dorleac.  (By the way, even if Dorleac is French, Cul-de-Sac is an English-language film.)