Bizarre, Bizarre (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Drole de Drame (Funny Drama, 1937) is, like Children of Paradise, a Marcel Carne-Jacques Prevert film.

Derived from a novel, it is a comic fantasy set in London (with French actors) where false accusations of murder drive a hulking botanist and his wife into hiding.  Everywhere there is a blithe disregard for authority and mores, but, to be sure, authority figures in the film behave inanely, hypocritically.  They can’t really be taken seriously, almost as though anarchy is justified.  At the same time, Drame satirizes mob justice, the mob mentality—as crazily unreliable as the pillars of society.

All this is handled with a light touch, with some high spirits, with odd details (multiple milk bottles left by Billy the milkman, Henri Guisol‘s Buffington constantly reclining on a sofa).  It’s too bad the actresses here are not very attractive—not even Nadine Vogel (as Eva)—but the histrions’ performances shine.  They make for true and engaging “funny drama.”

Also called Bizarre, Bizarre.  It can be.

(In French with English subtitles)

Showing on Netflix, A Week Away (2021) is an obtuse, unimaginative and unfunny Christian musical comedy. There are good inspirational and spiritual pop songs performed in it, but a well-written ditty about Christian life like Steven Curtis Chapman’s “The Great Adventure” deserves to be in a better flick. So does the felt Michael W. Smith ballad, “Place in this World” and, to a lesser extent, Rich Mullins’s “Awesome God.” These are all old songs, fortunately—they’re melodic—and pleasantly sung. But this movie, which is even quite unfocused, is a very rickety vehicle.

Reviews are by Dean

Mrs. Hyde (2017) is a weird French film, by Serge Bozon, which stars Isabelle Huppert as a bashful and passive schoolteacher persecuted by her students and disliked by her peers. Almost none of the teenagers in her physics class care about learning, albeit the one who gives her the most trouble—the disabled Arab boy, Malik (Adda Senani)—actually shows promise. Then, after she is struck by lightning, the schoolteacher, Mrs. Gequil, gains new energy and a strange measure of control over her students, Malik most of all. Soon, however, the magic ends, with Mrs. Gequil unable to keep herself from being preternaturally destructive. The film is a pessimistic dark comedy about European schools. Indeed, while it seems to expose a present-day culture of insults and contempt, it is subtly saying that traditional French society is on its way out and is taking French public education with it.

Yes, certain individuals will always show promise, and more, but mass learning is dead. Moreover, the character of a teacher is so vital to any success a school enjoys that it must not be broken down or subverted. But this is what happens in a metaphorical, outre way in Bozon’s Nutty Professor-like picture, with Huppert pulling it off like the great actress she is.

(In French with English subtitles. Currently available on Amazon Prime.)

Mrs. Hyde (2017) is a weird French film, by Serge Bozon, which stars Isabelle Huppert as a bashful and passive schoolteacher persecuted by her students and disliked by her peers. Almost none of the teenagers in her physics class care about learning, albeit the one who gives her the most trouble—the disabled Arab boy, Malik (Adda Senani)—actually shows promise. Then, after she is struck by lightning, the schoolteacher, Mrs. Gequil, gains new energy and a strange measure of control over her students, Malik most of all. Soon, however, the magic ends, with Mrs. Gequil unable to keep herself from being preternaturally destructive. The film is a pessimistic dark comedy about European schools. Indeed, while it seems to expose a present-day culture of insults and contempt, it is subtly saying that traditional French society is on its way out and is taking French public education with it.

Yes, certain individuals will always show promise, and more, but mass learning is dead. Moreover, the character of a teacher is so vital to any success a school enjoys that it must not be broken down or subverted. But this is what happens in a metaphorical, outre way in Bozon’s Nutty Professor-like picture, with Huppert pulling it off like the great actress she is.

(In French with English subtitles. Currently available on Amazon Prime.)

Today’s puritan liberalism would probably say, “Don’t make a movie about a black policeman who is a corrupt brute,” but that is what Antoine Fuqua‘s Training Day, from 2001 (a different time), is. And that it is detached from such philistine orthodoxy makes the film that much more respectable. Denzel Washington is electric and never false as the rule-breaking Officer Alonzo, who treats the rookie cop he is “training” (Ethan Hawke) like excrement. Puritan liberalism would also say, “Don’t require Eva Mendes to purvey, however briefly, full-frontal nakedness (especially since she’s a woman of color),” but TD does require it.

It’s too bad the film is a far less realistic police thriller than something like The French Connection. For example, after Alonzo beats Hawke’s rookie to a pulp because Hawke tries to arrest him, the rookie has enough remaining strength to throw himself on the hood of Alonzo’s moving car. Ludicrous. Still, wildly improbable as the movie is, one can have a raw good time with it. It’s a harshly masculine eye-opener, urban with an appealing Los Angeles setting. (Appealing to me, anyway.) Needing, yes, a more mature script, Training Day is nevertheless pretty thrilling.