Earlier this summer, I promised to post little updates about the various worthwhile titles in Cinematheque Ontario’s salute to the French New Wave, because there was just so much good stuff to talk about.
Well, there was good stuff aplenty, and naturally I got distracted and dropped the ball on most of it, including last week’s screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s exquisite Eloge De L’Amour. (I was sidetracked on that one by the death of John Hughes, which was arguably more relevant to our readership, but even so.)
Fortunately, there’s some good stuff left. Tonight (Friday), for instance, there’s an Eric Rohmer double-bill, pairing two of his films about love: 1966’s La Collectionneuse, which follows a love triangle in which two of the three points are trying very hard not to sleep with the third, and 2007’s Les Amours D’Astrée Et De Celadon, an only slightly more serious-minded tale of love and jealousy among the Druids. Either one – or both – would be the stuff of a great first date on a warm summer evening.
And if you’re looking for a second date, the program on Tuesday (August 18) features a trio of nouvelle vague shorts, including Rohmer’s 1963 Suzanne’s Career and Maurice Pialat’s 1960 cinematic essay Love Exists, which packs a decade and a half of melancholy for the vanished pre-war Paris into 20 lyrical minutes.
If you’re after something that’ll get your hearts beating a little faster, there’s Thursday’s (August 20) screening of Louis Malle’s 1957 Elevator To The Gallows, a finely-tuned clockwork thriller featuring exceptional work from an icy Jeanne Moreau, a slippery Miles Davis soundtrack and one hell of a last reel. It’s followed by Jean-Pierre Melville’s equally assured 1967 crime drama Le Samourai, which stars Alain Delon as a merciless hit man carrying out a contract in Paris. It’s not one of the New Wave screenings, but part of a parallel Melville retrospective one could argue, however that Melville’s sense of style and visual vocabulary make him a kind of sympathetic cousin to the nouvelle vague, or at least a fellow traveler.
But that’s a conversation to have after the movie, over a few cappuccinos – or a bottle of really good rosé. Just to keep the vibe going, you understand.[rssbreak]
