Change Your Image
moore1el
Reviews
La règle du jeu (1939)
Brilliant design, but leaves me cold
I was intrigued by a long review on this site detailing the reasons for the reviewer's dislike of the film, since I am also at a loss to understand the film's status. I can defend the film against the reviewer's comments: yes, Christine is vacuous (although also a naive stranger in a strange land, a little like Henry James's Isabel Archer), but hey, she's the Eternal Feminine, loving All Men, and None.
SPOILERS: As for the ending, it's tragedy (remember The Iliad, where Patrocles borrows Achilles' armour?), and the viewer just has to accept the element of contrivance. It's not supposed to be a surprise; we're supposed to guess, and dread, what's going to happen before the characters do, so that we watch the tragedy unfold with awful inevitablity. And if we haven't gotten to know the character who dies well enough to feel any emotion over the ending, he's the Romantic Hero, rash and reckless, and his death is significant because of what he represents.
But these are the problems: I intellectually understand what Renoir's characters are supposed to represent, and the archetypal significance their actions and fates are supposed to have. But maybe because they're archetypes rather than individuals, I can't feel anything for them. The movie has a beautiful design, but it just doesn't have any emotional immediacy for me (unlike contemporary Hollywood masterpieces). The plot is very similar to one of my favourite novels, "The Portrait of a Lady," but I'm drawn into that novel because the novel focuses on the heroine ("The Rules of the Game" is divided between the characters, a filmmaking style many defend for vaguely political reasons but which, in my opinion, diffuses emotion) and she is a complex, fascinating character, not a nebulous archetype. And I have to admit I'm fairly annoyed at the chauvinistic portrayal of women in so many "masterpieces" of European film (Fellini is another culprit): here we have the pert, sluttish maid, her fickle tease of a mistress, and her husband's clinging, irrational, hysterical ex-mistress. Unlike great European filmmakers like Ophuls and Dreyer, Renoir doesn't make even the slightest attempt to get inside the heads of his female characters: he doesn't necessarily judge them harshly, but he always perceives them from the outside.
After 3 viewings, this movie has gotten better for me, so I'm not giving up, and maybe one day it will make an emotional impact on me. Until then, however, I'm on the outside of this movie, too: I can understand why it's supposed to be great, but I just don't care about it.
Double Indemnity (1944)
If you like Wilder you'll probably like this...but I don't
I love Barbara Stanwyck and I love film noir, but I've never been able to understand why this film is considered a noir masterpiece, although I've tried it more than once. Maybe the problem is just that I don't like Billy Wilder. There's something remarkably unpleasant, something misanthropic, about his films. He likes female grotesques ("Sunset Blvd.," the drag queens, including Marilyn Monroe, in "Some Like It Hot"), and here he transforms the normally vibrant Stanwyck into one with that blonde helmet. She's not sexy (if you want to see Stanwyck sexy, go to Sturges's "The Lady Eve"), and I think that's the point. But then why should we believe in her relationship with Fred McMurray--and if we don't, why should we have any sympathy for the criminals, or care about what happens in the movie at all? But what I really can't get past is the dialogue, for which the movie is frequently lauded. It's absolutely terrible. It's not snappy at all; it's so convoluted and ornamented that Stanwyck and McMurray can't establish a natural (let alone fast-paced) rythmn between them. I'm not disturbed by the fact that "real people don't talk that way," but you find yourself paying more attention to the dialogue than the characters, and the dialogue bogs down the scenes instead of advancing the story--two marks of a bad dialogue writer. 6/10