The Robert Bresson picture, Mouchette (1967), is an adaptation of a short novel by Georges Bernanos.  

The novel, a successful one, is about a preteen French girl living in harsh, awful surroundings.  Dirt poor Mouchette is disliked by her peers and has an insensitive, criminal father and a dying mother.  Worse, she is eventually raped by an epileptic poacher.  It is easy to suspect she is en route to becoming a wicked young adult, but after hearing from an old woman, a layer-out of the dead, that the dead used to be worshipped as gods and that the woman herself  “understands” the dead, Mouchette decides to drown herself.  She escapes a hopeless world by dispatching herself to a realm where the dead are not merely dead, to God’s realm.

It is no surprise that the Catholic-born Bresson would be drawn to filming another Bernanos novel after directing Diary of a Country Priest many years earlier.  However, what he does with his customarily nonprofessional actors seriously harms Mouchette.  He insists on their being dry and undemonstrative, which of course means they’re histrionically sleepwalking.  It doesn’t work.  The film doesn’t work—it’s unconvincing—although certain shots and details are meaningful, even spiritually so.  That is, they have a “religious” power, such as the shot of the pond, and the simultaneous Magnificat music (by Monteverdi), where Mouchette’s suicide occurs.  We feel sure the Deity’s grace has reached this unsaved, terribly oppressed child.  Bresson’s movie could have been a winner, but a few things for which we can be grateful do characterize it.

(In French with English subtitles.)

Mouchette stands at the gate of the rides of the fair, looking at the people in the rides. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The 1965 short film, Black Girl, is the only feature I’ve seen by the late Ousmane Sembene, a Senegalese writer and director.

Mbissine Therese Diop, who plays Diouana, the black girl of the title, is not much of an actress and the voiceover narration is awfully repetitive, but BG‘s subject matter is formidable and the direction sophisticated without artiness.  Something else the film is without is the once fashionable Marxist beliefs Sembene held, for all it attacks is racial pride and condescension among postcolonial Europeans.

In Dakar, Senegal jobs are hard to get.  Eagerly, then, Diouana goes to work for a white couple that hires her to care for their three children.  Some time later the couple leave the Senegal the French had once colonized for the glorious Riveria, taking Diouana with them but also—a thousand pities—turning her into a virtual slave.  She cooks and cleans, nothing more, and is for a long time unpaid. 

Never is the white couple caricatured, which makes their free-floating racial pride, their racist state of mind, that much worse.  A basically harmless rebel in a state of despair is what Diouana becomes; she accomplishes nothing.  Her rebellious streak does her no more good than do the pretty dress and glamorous wig she wears for her time in France.

Despite some defects in Black Girl, and despite its being low-budget, it is nice to see an African work of art.  Sembene takes a situation with ordinary hopes and desires, with mundane necessities and activities, and turns it into something tragically grotesque.

Black Girl (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Metropolitan (1990) is the fascinating Whit Stillman’s first film.  I staunchly disagree with those critics who say it’s his best; I think it’s his weakest.  In its last few scenes the movie’s story self-destructs incorrigibly, and there is some mild sentimentality besides.  But the film is a very watchable literate comedy, the usual brainy confection.  The characters here are young men and women usually called preppies—or, as one fellow would have it, U.H.B. (Urban Haute Bourgeoisie).

Stillman zeroes in on the disconnect between these people’s smart conversation with its political dimension and their inactive, deb-society lives.  Often they’re lovable frauds, but all of them need to move on.  There’s growing up to do.  All the same, several of the young men ask themselves whether those of their generation are decisively “doomed to failure.”  Stillman seems comfortable with the idea that yes, they’ll become failures, but no, they’re not doomed.

I can hardly stand music videos, and “Good Time” by Owl City and Carly Rae Jepsen is the kind of catchy pop song you get tired of after about ten listenings.  But bring together “Good Time” and its accompanying little film, and you have a likable entertainment. 

The subject matter of the video is simple:  Adam Young (he’s Owl City), Carly Rae and other young people go camping—enjoying every minute of it.  With the music, the film is charming; solo turns by Young and Jepsen are properly shot and seductively pleasant.  And, hey, the kids never get drunk or high.  One supposes the black girl with the cross around her neck would never go for that.  There isn’t even any amorous kissing.

Also, the video is unpretentious, unlike scores of other music videos.

Needless to say, the “Good Time” flick is available on YouTube.

Apparently some of the material in the Kathryn Bigelow film, The Hurt Locker, was rather laughable; certain bomb-disposal soldiers found it so. Certain bits and pieces in Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012), written by Mark Boal, probably are as well, while other details are simply false, such as the intel about Osama bin Laden’s courier being acquired through waterboarding.  But no matter.  The politically unbiased Zero is sufficiently honest to communicate that waterboarding, form of torture though it is, can be effective.  It does so without condoning or despising it, however; rather it shows it journalistically and reticently.  It is this that has drawn fire from the liberal elites.

Strong and involving, this hunt-for-bin Laden docudrama is all about CIA activity, especially that of Jessica Chastain’s Maya.  It tells us that a strong nation always puts up a fight against a Hitlerian enemy, even with a temporarily failing intelligence agency (which is what the CIA is here).  Notice I said “temporarily.”  In truth the film respects the CIA.

Regrettably, Maya is not a fully realized character and far less interesting than Carrie in the TV series Homeland.  Chastain does what she can with her, though, which is a lot.  Jason Clark is vivid and gripping as CIA officer Dan.  The British actress Jennifer Ehle, this time with an American accent, succeeds beautifully.

I have lately seen some meaningful and significant political films:  Won’t Back Down, Lincoln, Atlas Shrugged Part 2, and now Zero Dark Thirty (a military phrase, by the way, meaning 30 minutes after midnight).  The more this kind of cinema irritates the liberal elites, or at least challenges their views, the better, for then we have cultural diversity of thought and sentiment.  It makes for a healthier situation in the arts than we have had.

Zero Dark Thirty: This one felt important (Photo credit: MikeOliveri)