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.)

In my view, Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1974) is a bit too visually polished for a movie about a killer and his girlfriend on the lam.  But unforgettable shots and sounds (in the score) proliferate, and Malick’s writing can be brilliant.

Kit and Holly, “lovers”, are ever busy acting and thinking, acting and thinking, but never cease to be victims of their own disjointed minds.  They allow a kind of paralysis, certainly a moral one, to overtake them, and if we infer that this is due to alienation, John Simon dealt with that subject in his superb 1974 review of the film.  He wrote that “Badlands sees alienation as it is: the incapacity or unwillingness to recognize the humanity of others . . .”  This indeed describes Kit (Martin Sheen), the actual murderer, but also Holly (Sissy Spacek), who murders no one.

Cover of Badlands

The plot of the 1959 German film, The Bridge, is pivoted on this:  “In the very last days of World War II a group of seven German high-school friends are hastily impressed into the army” (Stanley Kauffmann).  A country in trouble, perhaps, is willing to recruit its sixteen-year-old boys, and although the boys here are meant to be relatively safe, they are not.

What comes about is not only the usual fog of war but also the savage folly of war—of a war conducted by a country, Germany, whose ideals have been hijacked by scoundrels.  (So claims the boys’ teacher.)  Domestic drama in the boys’ lives is eclipsed by battlefield horrors.

Directed by Bernhard Wicki, The Bridge is authentically anti-war, a famous old Euro-artwork still vivid and meaningful.

(In German with English subtitles)