Place in the Sun, A
[See “Entry from July 8, 2009” under “My Diary”]
[See “Entry from July 8, 2009” under “My Diary”]
A Place Called Chiapas, directed by the Canadian Nettie Wild, is a documentary about what the New York Times has rightly called “the world’s first post-modern revolution.” It begins with military vehicles emerging from darkness and a voiceover talking about the Zapatista movement of the Chiapan campesinos, led by Subcomandante Marcos, as having been “born…
Nettoyage à Sec (Dry Cleaning) by Anne Fontaine presents us with a French version of that now familiar Hollywood trope, merely gestured towards in 8mm, the capacity for sexual adventurism and even perversion in all of us. Nicole (Miou-Miou) and Jean-Marie (Charles Berling) have been married for 15 years and run a dry-cleaning establishment in…
The paradox of cinéma vérité is that the excitement of being in ever closer touch with real life via the camera is always being undermined by the banality of what real life generally has to show us. For this reason, the most vérité generally has to be the most feigning. But the various sorts of…
Lars von Trier, clowning around in his own inimitable fashion with the End of the World
And here comes yet another baby-boomer with a lingering grudge against daddy. Stop the presses!
La Vita è Bella or Life is Beautiful was directed and co-written by Roberto Benigni, who stars as Guido Orefice, a Jewish waiter in Arezzo before the war. He woos and wins his wife, Dora (Nicoletta Braschi), whom he calls la principessa — the princess — in memorably comic and romantic style and manages to…