The Screengrab : the duchess of langeais

2008 in Review: Paul Clark's Favorite Movie Moments

Paul Clark — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Starting tomorrow, the writers of Screengrab will be unveiling their lists of the top 10 films of 2008. But before that begins, I’d like to post a different sort of list of highlights from the past year. For those of you who’ve only started reading recently, I used to write a bi-weekly column called “The Movie Moment,” in which I’d explore in depth some of my favorite scenes from movies both old and new. This past spring, I had to put the column on indefinite hiatus for various reasons, but I wanted to bring it back for this week only so I could celebrate some of my favorite Movie Moments of 2008. However, I had such a devil of time trying to narrow down my list that I’ve decided to simply list all of the moments that made me laugh out loud, cry like a baby, bite my nails uncontrollably, or which otherwise rocked my world this past year. This list is by no means meant to be taken as comprehensive, but merely were the moments which readily sprang to mind while I was writing the piece. So without further ado, I give you…

2008: The Year in Movie Moments:

(in no particular order)

The little boy’s confession notes- In Bruges

“No-no-no. I kill the bus driver.” - The Dark Knight

The security guard makes his rounds - Man on Wire

Sidney’s musical vows - Rachel Getting Married

The kiss that launched a thousand lens flares - Silent Light (only one of several transcendent moments in the film- the swimming-hole scene or the epic rainstorm might just as easily have qualified)

Mike’s late-night visit (or really, anytime Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried” is played) - The Strangers

Peekaboo nudity - The Romance of Astrea and Celadon

Harry unveils the machine - Burn After Reading (honestly, who could possibly enjoy THAT?)

Madame Gaudens’ confession - A Girl Cut in Two

Incident at the race track - My Winnipeg

Most hilarious random line of the year: “When it comes to women, you’re Michael Jordan. I’m… Bill Laimbeer.” - Baghead

The new army suits up for battle - Role Models

Alex takes a shower - Paranoid Park

Brandi forgets her cell phone - Stuck

Black Kold Medina puts on a show - Trouble the Water

Runaway penguin - Encounters at the End of the World

Jung-rae Kim diagrams his neuroses - Woman on the Beach

Alex’s sex surprise, both inevitable and strangely erotic - XXY

The director’s big exit - Tropic Thunder

Most unlikely tearjerking moment of the year: Fred Knittle sings “Fix You”, Young@Heart

Three-way fist fight: Seth Rogen vs. James Franco vs. Danny McBride - Pineapple Express

The Richard McGuire segment - Fear(s) of the Dark

Ninjas! - In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (yes, really)

And finally, my five favorite openings and finales of the year:

Perfect openings: “Put on Your Sunday Clothes”, WALL*E; Sunrise, Silent Light; The piano, The Silence Before Bach; The Jean-Claude Van Damme Stunt Spectacular, JCVD; The Legend of Po, Kung Fu Panda

Great final scenes (no spoilers): Synecdoche, New York, The Duchess of Langeais, Shine a Light, The Visitor, Burn After Reading

I would invite all of you to share some of your favorites in the comments section. After all, I’m surely missing at least a couple of really good ones.

Guillaume Depardieu, 1971-2008

Phil Nugent — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Guillaume Depardieu has died, tragically and most unexpectedly, at 37, after being hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia. Although he was probably best known as the son of Gerard Depardieu, Guillaume had established a name for himself as a film actor and leading man, as well as a provider of fodder for tabloids and gossip columnists. He made his film debut in 1974, playing the three-year-old son of the hero, played by his father, of Claude Goretta's international success The Wonderful Crook. He gave his first mature film performance seventeen years later in Alain Corneau's Tout les matins du monde ("All the Mornings of the World"), in which he played the musician Marin Marais as a young man, with his father handling the role of the older Marais. Guillaume and Gerard would repeat this doubling up act, with each appearing in two French miniseries, The Count of Monte Cristo (1998) and Les Miserables (2000), in which they took turns playing the heroes of classic works of French literature at different ends of their lives. They also appeared together, as father and son, in the 2002 Aime ton Pere (known in English as both Honor They Father and A Loving Father), as well as the French-English TV miniseries Napoleon (2002), in which neither one of them played Napoleon, thank God.

In projects independent of his father, Guillaume Deparidieu established an image as a smoldering, not always likable romantic figure, with a tendency towards brooding and fiery sexual passions. In that mold, he will probably be best remembered as the star of Pola X, Leos Carax's controversial, wild-eyed adaptation of Herman Melville's Pierre, and his most recent film to reach the United States, Jacques Rivette's period drama The Duchess of Langeais, in which, looking more than ever like an alternate-universe version of his father who had managed to control himself around the buffet table, he did his banked-fires thing with the actress Jeanne Balibar. Offscreen, it often seemed that his diet was the only thing that Depardieu was able to control. After injuring his knee in a motorcycle accident in 1995, he suffered an infection that left him in such constant pain that, in 2003, he consented to have his leg amputated. He got in trouble with the law over DUI arrests and assorted drug-related offenses, and in 2003 he was slapped with a nine-month suspended sentence and a $9,000 fine after he reportedly pulled a gun on a man in a bar who, badly misjudging his temperament, had decided to get off a couple of zingers insulting his taste in clothes. It was the business with the boom stick in the bar that caused his father to publicly disown him in an interview with Paris Match, saying of his son, ""He's a real poet who touches me enormously, but who is very difficult, incorrigible. At the moment, we have no ties. I cut things off because I no longer want to be the wall, or the trash bin where one dumps anything one wants. He has tried to contact me but I don't reply because I think that it's better for his mental health. We'll see." Guillaume was in Romania working on a new movie when he was taken ill with the virus that killed him.

Half Measures: Paul Clark's Favorites of the First Half of '08

Paul Clark — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Last week, Screengrab’s Andrew Osborne shared with you his favorite movies from the second quarter of 2008, so I figured that I might as well get in on the act as well. Unlike Andrew, I’ll be writing about my favorite releases dating back to the beginning of the year, mostly because I didn’t write one of these back in April. But I’d like to concur with Andrew’s statement that the moviegoing year, like so many others, started slowly but quickly improved in quality as it continued, with both big-budget blockbusters and limited-release arthouse fare making strong showings thusfar.

My top five:

1. The Duchess of Langeais- had Jacques Rivette not made a film called L’Amour Fou forty years ago, he very well might have given his most recent film that title. Based on a novel by Balzac, Duchess often plays like a mirror image of The Age of Innocence- only this time, the knowledge (and flouting) of propriety only serves to drive an emotional wedge between the two lovers. The Duchess (Jeanne Balibar) and her officer (Guillaume Depardieu) must play games with each other in lieu of an actual relationship, and almost imperceptibly their innocent courtship spirals out of their control. All the while, Rivette’s formal boldness remains intact, resulting in his best film in over a decade- no mean feat for a master of Rivette’s standing.

2. WALL*E- speaking of masters, was anyone really surprised that Pixar’s latest turned out as wonderful as it did? In perhaps their most experimental gambit to date, much of WALL *E is practically dialogue-free, as director Andrew Stanton and his team make most of their points visually. And what visuals! So beautifully-rendered is the dusty Earth future of the film’s first half that the more traditionally eye-popping second half (with its interstellar mega-mall) looks almost chintzy by comparison, like all the life and heart was drained from it. Which is of course the point, as WALL*E’s message isn’t so much anti-corporate as anti-complacency, celebrating the industriousness and determination of its robotic protagonist while despairing of those who would content themselves with having their decisions made and lives lived for them.

3. Stuck- like The Duchess of Langeais, Stuart Gordon’s latest film tells the story of a man and a woman locked in a tragic, fateful duet. The difference is that this one is about a guy who gets stuck in a windshield. There’s nothing pretty about Stuck, from Gordon’s grimy visuals and grayish color palette to the behavior his film portrays, as the film’s anti-heroine (played by Mena Suvari) hides the accident victim (Stephen Rea) in her garage rather than risk jeopardizing the insignificant promotion she supposedly has coming to her. Stuck is a film born of its working-class setting, in which the poor fight over the scraps the rich give them, with little regard for the lives of those who get in their way. It’s ugly, harrowing stuff, but it’s also thrilling like the best exploitation films are, and Stuck is one of the best movies of this kind to come along in ages.

4. Paranoid Park- for years, Gus Van Sant has specialized in films about outsiders, but this is the closest he’s come thusfar to seeing the world through an outsider’s eyes. Much of the credit goes to the subjectivity inherent in Van Sant’s favored style, which he perfects with this film, as he follows a marginalized teenager (newcomer Gabe Nevins) who views his world- his parents, his peers, his girlfriend- from a distance, even before the killing he may or may not have been responsible for causes him to sever emotional ties from them altogether. He would sooner escape into his own mind as find a place for himself in this world, a point Van Sant makes most vivid in the scene where the protagonist takes a shower as the soundtrack becomes overrun with rainforest sounds. Simultaneously nightmarish and poetic, Paranoid Park is a major work by a filmmaker who remains as experimental as ever.

5. Speed Racer- yes, really. I sort of wonder if the overwhelming critical drubbing that was afforded the Wachowski Brothers’ adaptation of the animated series was due to the directors’ key inspirations- comic books, video games, Saturday morning cartoons- not being part of the critics’ pasts. Granted, I too was skeptical about the film going in, but it didn’t take long for it to win me over. I’ll be damned if I can find a subtext, but with its dazzling array of eye-popping colors, deliberately unrealistic effects, and snazzy edits (Ang Lee could take a lesson in the latter from the Wachowskis), that scarcely matters. The racetrack scenes alone gave me that rush that all big summer movies promise but which few deliver, playing like the Day-glo daydream of a Pixie Stick-fueled kid racing and smashing up Matchbox cars. Plus there are ninjas, and as any young boy can tell you, ninjas make every movie better.

Indie Box-Office Roundup: Weekend of March 7-9, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Note: Due to a delay on the part of IndieWire's Box Office Charts, I was unable to post this until today. So for all of you who were hoping to read this week's Roundup over a mid-morning snack (hi Mom!), I'm truly sorry. I'll do my best to post on time in the future.

In a busy weekend for specialty releases, Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park came out on top, with an impressive per-screen average of $14,914 on two screens. The IFC Films release, which debuted at Cannes last year, led a weekend that saw eleven new arthouse releases plus a number of strong holdovers from previous weeks. According to Mark Boxer, IFC's VP of Sales and Distribution, "The audience for the film consisted of Gus Van Sant fans and a strong turnout from the youthful/skateboarding community. The reviews for the film have been very strong from New York and the film will roll out to the top fifteen markets within the next two weeks."

Holding steady at #2 was last weekend's champion, Ramin Bahrani's Chop Shop (Koch Lorber), which in its single-screen engagement dropped only 5% from last weekend's take. Debuting strongly at #3 was David Gordon Green's Snow Angels (Warner Independent), with another debut, Ira Sachs' Married Life (Sony Pictures Classics), coming in at #5. Rounding out the top five was the Oscar-winner for Best Foreign-Language Film, The Counterfeiters (Sony Pictures Classics).

Also of note was #7 finisher Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day (Focus Features), which was the weekend's highest-averaging release playing on more than 500 screens. Mostly middling reviews couldn't scare away crowds who were no doubt jonesing for more Amy Adams cuteness in a slightly more adult context. Meanwhile, The Duchess of Langeais fell to #9 (sigh) and longtime list mainstays The Band's Visit (Sony) and In Bruges (Focus) dropped off entirely.

Finally, I feel like I ought to mention this week's #10 film by a nose, the documentary Fighting For Life. I mention it not because I've seen it or even because I've heard anything about it, but because its distributor (Truly Indie) would no doubt like me to believe it's the only movie that truly belongs on this list, much like this week's #8 film would like to remind me that girls do indeed rock.

These are the jokes, people.

Top 10, Weekend of March 7-9:
1. Paranoid Park [IFC Films] ($14,914 per screen)
2. Chop Shop [Koch Lorber Films] ($7,944)
3. Snow Angels [Warner Independent Pictures] ($7,124)
4. The Counterfeiters [Sony Pictures Classics] ($6,820)
5. Married Life [Sony Pictures Classics] ($6,206)
6. Blindsight [Spark Entertainment] ($5,279)
7. Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day [Focus Features] ($4,656)
8. Girls Rock! [Shadow Distribution] ($4,246)
9. The Duchess Of Langeais [IFC Films] ($3,723)
10. Fighting For Life [Truly Indie] ($3,423)

Source: IndieWire.

Indie Box-Office Roundup: Weekend of February 29-March 2

Paul Clark — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

As I predicted in last week's column, arthouse audiences turned out in droves to catch The Counterfeiters (Sony Pictures Classics), Stefan Ruzowitzky's recent Oscar-winner for Best Foreign-Language Film. Currently in its second week of release, The Counterfeiters tops this week's Indie Box-Office Roundup with in an average of $10,295 per screen in 18 venues, following a strong second-place finish in its opening weekend.

The weekend's top new release was Ramin Bahrani's Chop Shop (Koch Lorber), bringing in $8,745 on a single screen, followed by last week's champ, Jacques Rivette's The Duchess of Langeais, which kept on rockin' at $7,059 per screen after expanding its release to three locations. Rounding out the top five were (stop me if you've heard this before) Sony Pictures Classics' The Band's Visit and Focus Features' In Bruges, the latter expanding to 232 screens nationwide.

Also of note was the release of Chicago 10 (Roadside Attractions), the highest-ranking documentary of the weekend at #6. And let's not overlook the Oscar bump for Best Picture winner No Country for Old Men, which found its way back into the top 10 after a nearly three-month absence following an expansion to more than 2,000 screens. Take that, Juno! ¿Quien es mas macho?

Top 10, Weekend of February 29-March 2:
1. The Counterfeiters [Sony Pictures Classics] ($10,295 per screen)
2. Chop Shop [Koch Lorber Films] ($8,745)
3. The Duchess Of Langeais [IFC Films] ($7,059)
4. The Band's Visit [Sony Pictures Classics] ($4,553)
5. In Bruges [Focus Features] ($3,342)
6. Chicago 10 [Roadside Attractions] ($3,052)
7. The Unforeseen [Cinema Guild] ($2,496)
8. Caramel [Roadside Attractions] ($2,300)
9. The Year My Parents Went On Vacation [City Lights Pictures Releasing] ($2,121)
10. No Country For Old Men [Miramax] ($2,020)

Source: IndieWire.

Indie Box-Office Roundup: Weekend of February 22-24, 2008

Paul Clark — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

One of the pleasures of doing the weekly Indie Box-Office Roundup is that there are more surprises to be had with this top ten than with the top-grossing films overall. For example, I never thought I'd live to type the following six words: "Jacques Rivette, domestic box-office champ." Naturally, we're talking per-screen average rather than overall gross, but still — wow. Rivette's latest film, The Duchess of Langeais (IFC Films), took in a per-screen average of $11,126 on two screens over the past weekend. What makes this weekend's haul even more of a surprise is that Rivette's last film, L'Histoire de Marie et Julien was snubbed altogether by American distributors as being "too uncommercial." As a long-standing Rivette fan, I'm happy to see that others are responding as positively to his new work as I did. I don't expect it to stay on top, but I'll enjoy its reign while it lasts.

Coming in a strong second was Sunday night's Best Foreign-Language Film winner, Stefan Ruzowitzky's The Counterfeiters (Sony Pictures Classics). In its first weekend in American theatres, the film brought in an average of $10,939 per screen on eight screens. Expect the film's totals to soar next weekend, as Oscar-watchers turn out to see what all the fuss is about.

Sitting at #3 and #4 were last week's top two, The Band's Visit (Sony Pictures Classics) and In Bruges (Focus Features), followed by the weekend's top documentary, A Man Named Pearl (Shadow Distribution). Also worth mentioning is 9th-place film La Traviata (Emerging Pictures), a limited-engagement performance of Verdi's opera. It's hard to gauge how the opera's attendance compares to the other titles in this week's top ten, since although many cities are showing the movie fewer times than their other titles, tickets generally sell for upwards of $20.

Next weekend should see a bump for the Oscar-winners still in release, not just The Counterfeiters but also Best Documentary Feature winner Taxi to the Dark Side, and to a certain extent No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood.

Top 10, Weekend of February 22-24:
1. The Duchess Of Langeais [IFC Films] ($11,126 per screen)
2. The Counterfeiters [Sony Pictures Classics] ($10,939)
3. The Band's Visit [Sony Pictures Classics] ($4,908)
4. In Bruges [Focus Features] ($4,530)
5. A Man Named Pearl [Shadow Distribution] ($3,308)
6. Still Life [New Yorker] ($2,933)
7. Undoing [Indican Pictures] ($2,897)
8. George A. Romero's Diary Of The Dead [Third Rail Releasing] ($2,540)
9. La Traviata [Emerging Pictures] ($2,503)
10. The Year My Parents Went On Vacation [City Lights Pictures Releasing] ($2,485)

Source: IndieWire.

Screengrab Review: The Duchess of Langeais

Peter Smith — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 17:30:00 GMT

It's rather unfortunate that Jacques Rivette's latest film is being released here with a title that conveys generic period stodginess à la Masterpiece Theatre, since the original French title — Ne touchez pas la hache, or "Don't Touch the Axe" — better conveys the razor-sharp edges of this superlative, expertly calibrated battle of wills. Faithfully adapted from Honoré de Balzac's novella, it opens in and around a Spanish convent, where gimpy, sullen war veteran Armand de Montriveau (Guillaume Depardieu, son of Gérard) seeks an audience with a Barefoot Carmelite nun who calls herself Sister Theresa (Jeanne Balibar). Their brief, impassioned interview, conducted under the suspicious eye of the Mother Superior, abruptly concludes when an agonized Sister Theresa cries out, "Mother, I have lied to you! This man is my lover!" At which point the film jumps back five years in order to recount the torturous quasi-courtship of the nun — now revealed as the titular Duchess — and the general, an affair characterized by elaborate, courtly head games that amount to a 19th-century equivalent of The Rules.

Nobody understood the maddening allure of the almost attainable better than Balzac, and Rivette matches the author's emotional precision with one subtly stunning composition after another, buttressed by a handful of short yet heartbreaking lateral pans that move us from master to close-up without the violence of a cut. (It's the cut afterward that draws blood.) He also makes much more effective and perverse use of textual intertitles than did Patrice Chéreau in Gabrielle, a film that now looks even more overwrought and mannered by comparison. Balibar's wily, impassioned performance was a given — her best work to date was as the star of Rivette's 2001 effort La Savoir — but I hadn't expected such muted volcanic ardor from Depardieu fils, who practically broods a hole in the floor of every room he enters. And while I'm weary of the structural device in which we open with the penultimate scene and then flash back to see the events that led to this crisis/impasse, here the device is absolutely crucial, tainting every bit of gamesmanship that follows/precedes it. Indeed, I desperately hoped that the film would end without returning to the convent, and was somewhat disappointed when there turned out to be an epilogue of sorts. But even that perfunctory flourish slices clean. — Mike D'Angelo

World Film Beat: "The Duchess of Langeais"

Phil Nugent — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

The legendary French director Jacques Rivette is almost eighty now, but age seems to be speeding up his internal clock; his newest film, The Duchess of Langeais is two hours and seventeen minutes long, which, coming from the man who made Out 1 (773 minutes in its "restored" version), La Belle noiseuse (236 minutes), L'Amour fou (252 minutes), and Celine and Julie Go Boating (193 minutes), is kind of like Martin Scorsese reading the Bible in ten minutes while on crack. Rivette's 2001 romantic comedy Va Savoir actually set off concerned muttering among long-time fans who were worried about him because he'd only managed to get 154 minutes of movie into theaters; everybody was greatly relieved when word got out that there was also a 220-minute director's cut that he'd love to show you. (The concept of the director's cut might have been invented with Rivette in mind; he recut the four-hour La Belle noiseuse into a two-hour-five-minute film that was released to theaters as Divertimento, though it was not explained why anyone would want a shorter version of a movie that largely consisted of Emmanuelle Béart standing around buck naked.) Speaking as someone who has sometimes emerged from a Rivette movie feeling as if both my ass and my eyeballs were in need of a vigorous massage and possibly a chemical skin peel, I've always admired his willingness to test the boundaries of an acceptable running time for narrative films. It was as if he were saying to the audience for art movies, "Hey, you care about cinema, huh? You believe in the personal expression of the filmmaker? You're here because you think you might get something different than what you get from mainstream movies, is that right? That's great. So sit down, shut up, and prepare to pay the babysitter overtime!" Except that it would sound a lot better if Rivette said that, since everything sounds better in French. Although The Duchess of Langeais is much shorter than the frisky Va Savoir, I doubt that it will strike anyone as ominously lightweight. The good news for veteran Rivette fans is that while it's only a little more than two and a quarter hours, it feels at least twice that long.

The movie is based on a Balzac novel whose original title, which is also the movie's title in France, is "Touch Not the Axe," words that might be Rivette's motto in the editing room. It is not so much a love story as an exploration of the deranging possibilities of thwarted expectations and unrequited desire. Set mostly in Paris in the 1820s, the movie stars Guillaume Depardieu as a general who has become a fashionable celebrity because of his adventures, and Jeanne Balibar as the Duchess, who invites him to visit her at home in the evenings. Talking to his imaginary friend while he stands outside the Duchess's home, the general boasts of his intention to "make her my mistress." But once he gets indoors, the Duchess, who has carefully laid herself out for his delectation, asks him to tell her stories of his heroism, then, having gotten him all worked up, sends him homr frustrated night after night. Finally he cracks and declares that he can't take it anymore and will never visit nor have anything to do with her again — which, naturally, causes her to snap and begin moaning about how she can't bear to be without him. At one point she scandalizes the neighborhood by sending her coach to stay outside the general's house all night and into the morning, so that people will at least think that she's his fallen woman. It's a little like Les Liaisons dangereuses, except that instead of using the rules of love and seduction to wage cold-blooded war on others, the characters are flaunting how desperately they're at the mercy of their passions. At the same time, nobody's actually getting any. Most of the movie is a flashback from a scene where the general finds the Duchess, who has disappeared from Paris and his life, holed up in a convent on a Spanish island, serving as a Carmelite nun. They converse for a while in French, while chaperoned by a nun who doesn't speak the language, who thinks that the general is the Duchess's brother — though from all the heavy panting that he does when in his "sister's" presence, she must think the poor guy is about to drop dead of asthma. Finally, the Duchess can't take it anymore and cries out, "Sister, I have lied to you! This man is my lover!" When I saw the movie, that line brought down the house. A lot of people in the theater burst out laughing, though it isn't supposed to be funny, and I don't think it was mocking laughter, either. It was obvious that we were about to see what had gone on between these two now, and it felt like people were laughing at relief and eager anticipation that now we were getting to the good stuff. Little did we know...

Rivette has made a terrific show of being faithful to his source. Most of the movie consists of carefully composed scenes where the actors speak their dialogue, and much of what narrative information can't be conveyed through these means is simply given to us written out on title cards. The movie is...well, it's kind of boring, but in a kind of fascinating way. The actors are up there smoldering away in these tight, frozen frames, and the emotions are over the top yet seem to be contained under glass. Balibar's performance, which has to run the gamut from cruel, controlling minx to helpless victim of love, is phenomenal; Depardieu's isn't as sturdy, but he's still hard to take your eyes off, if only because he looks enough like his father that watching him is like seeing a vision of what Gerard Depardieu might have looked like in his late thirties if he'd had his stomach stapled. Still, there's a sequence towards the end when the general is on a ship with some mates of his who want to help him abduct his beloved from the nunnery. The men in his posse don't have much to do, but just from the way they pull together on their mission and they way they grin while drawing straws to see which of them has to dress up in a habit and go undercover, they seem like a fun bunch of guys, and it's amazing what a relief it is to spend some time with them after two hours trapped inside with two neurotic, self-denying romantic masochists. The Duchess of Langeais goes into U.S. theatrical release next week, but tonight it begins its run at Walter Reade Theater in New York as part of the "Film Comments Selects" series. Some of the people seeing it tonight sure did pick a hell of a date movie for Valentine's Day.