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15 Minutes with Sean Baker

Brandon Judell — Thu, 30 Dec 2021 21:53:07 +0000

15 Minutes with Sean Baker Brandon Judell December 30, 2021 - 16:53

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Simon Rex being directed by Sean Baker in Red Rocket

If "America is nothing if not about categories," as social critic Hinton Als insists, then writer/director/editor Sean Baker has consistently mined those huddling under the "disenfranchised" heading. The American Dream has often slipped from his characters' grasps, so they seek respite in some sort of bargain-basement Heaven of their own making, at times sated by drugs, sex, doughnuts, Bingo, and a good dash of whimsey.

Baker's cri de coeur: "I'm always looking for authenticity in my films; they are based in realism."

Not surprisingly, his movies -- such as the must -- see Starlet (2012), Tangerine (2015), and The Florida Project (2017), plus his latest, Red Rocket -- are swathed in a gritty reality, each clearly aided by a cast of pros and non-professionals.

This formula seems to be working. According to IMDB, Baker's output has so far earned him 46 awards and 74 nominations, and those accolades grow daily, with his latest effort even being considered for a possible Oscar nom or two. (Note: Willem Dafoe got one as Best Actor for The Florida Project.)

Red Rocket, which has already made the National Board of Review's "Top Ten Film" list and won its lead (Simon Rex) a Best Actor Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, tells of a down-and-out porn star, Mikey Saber. We meet Saber as he skedaddles from Los Angeles, with his limp tail between his legs, back to Texas City, a small town he swore he’d never return to. Broke, battered, and with no prospects, he begs his drug-addicted wife (Bree Elrod), whom he’s ignored for over a decade, to take him in. With the promise of paying rent, he procures a place for himself on the couch, next to his weathered mother-in-law (the fabulous Brenda Deiss), who has a passion for TV court shows and crack.

Saber, a sycophantic scuzzball of an anti-hero if there ever was one, has only one goal in life: to keep himself alive and happy . . . and to return to porn as a big macher, no matter the cost to others. To get there, he'll even sell drug-free urine to construction workers. But then in the local Donut Hole, he runs into a 17-year-old high schooler nicknamed Strawberry whom he just might have seedy plans for. Oh, no! This doesn’t seem quite the path to redemption, but another seedy journey that causes Indiewire’s David Ehrlich to spout that here is an "utterly singular and weirdly lovable Red Rocket, a roman candle of a movie that wonders if America's pathological narcissism will ever burn itself out."

To find how the boyishly attractive Baker is dealing with this avalanche of acclaim and whether he's conquered all the insecurities that a graduate of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts might harbor, we Zoomed each other earlier this month,

"That's a good question, man. I thought it would," he laughed. "I thought those things would help. I'm seeing a therapist now for my 'impostor syndrome,' which has majorly kicked in right now. I don't know why. At least it happened after my seventh feature. I don't know. Maybe it's the pressure or the stress of expectations."

Well, at least you can afford a therapist.

Nodding, Baker agreed: "I have health insurance now."

So is it true that you thoroughly researched the sex industry for years and years for this project?

I wasn't entrenched for years and years. I mean there were moments, especially back with Starlet. . . . That's probably when we spent the most amount of time visiting sets, getting to know people within the industry, and keeping in touch over the last ten years.

Is your family happy that you are probably through with this subject matter?

Actually, my mother hasn’t seen this movie. I don't know if she will. I want to cut a PG-13 version of it. My father saw it and really . . . I don't know. But my father's a lawyer so he likes to . . . He can't compliment. (Laughs.) But I don't know if I'm done with the subject matter actually. I'm done probably focusing on the adult film world, but that’s just a small aspect of sex work in general, and I’m very still interested in exploring sex work and different aspects of it. So maybe that’s not done.

In one critique of your work -- and I don’t know how to put it -- but the writer was sort of upset you weren't homosexual. I believe they wanted to make you an honorary Queer, I guess, because of Tangerine. Clearly, your work has struck a note with the LGBTQI community. Do you find that an honor or what? If someone gave you a homosexual tiara, would you put it on?

Of course. Of course. Why not? (Laughs)

Red Rocket is now receiving rapturous reviews. Were you secure that you had a critical success when you finished editing . . . or did you need to see the audiences standing and applauding at the first few festival screenings.

I'll tell you a quick little story. I'll make it really brief. I’m sitting at Cannes. You know that theatre is so incredible. It's a beautiful, beautiful theater with great acoustics so you're just hearing the film. You're not really hearing the audience reaction. I couldn't really tell. I really couldn't really read the room. So, actually, to tell the truth, I was in my neurotic crazy self so I assumed we bombed.

Well, the end credits are rolling, and I lean over to my wife, Samantha Quan, who's one of the producers on the film, and I'm like "Listen! We're not gonna get an ovation. It’s fine. It's all good. I'm chill. I'm gonna deal with it. I'm not gonna flip out, but I going to have to deal with my actors. You know, they might not know how to take boos and things like that."

And literally for the two minutes during the final credits, I had this crazy Curb-Your-Enthusiasm-type conversation with my wife. Then the ovation kicks in, and I'm like, "Oh, is this a mercy clap?" So for the next two minutes, I'm assuming it's a mercy clap, and there’s even one moment where I actually even hugged Simon. I gave him a pat on the back as if better luck next time. Like next time we'll do it.

Then it started, and it kept going, and I was like: “Oh, this is good, isn't it? This is good.” So it was at that point I realized that actually we were receiving a lot of love. And from that moment on, it's been really wonderful. But then you know I'm still a crazy, neurotic director. I never know what to expect, and who knows what will happen when this film is released into the real world? This has just been the festival lot, you know.

Lucino Visconti utilized non-professional actors powerfully in La Terra Trema (1948). You do so likewise regularly. I was bit shocked when discovering much of your cast was plucked off the streets so to say. Especially the mother, Brenda Deiss. She's quite amazing. I wanted her in every scene. Did you have problems working with non-actors?

No. Actually, this cast was incredible. I'm so blessed that I found all these first timers who were not only enthusiastic about being in this small, little indie, but also about having their incredible talent. I mean they were all so talented. Brittney Rodriguez, Ethan Darbone. Brenda Deiss.

Plus, I also have my wife, one of my producers. She was actually also the coach for the first-timers on the film. She started with me on The Florida Project, working with the two children and the moms. We then realized this was a great relationship we got going and that she could be there for the first timers and make them comfortable and almost be their maternal figure while I'm all focused on other things.

So that's been helping a lot. Just so you know, and I'm serious about this, sometimes they're first timers that you look at, and you have a relationship with them, and they know, "Okay, this is a one-off. This is the only film I'll probably ever be in, and that's okay 'cause I have a whole other life." But then there are some first timers where you can see them on a Hollywood set the next day, and they’re being able to do it and be professional and pull it off, and Ethan Darbone and Brittney Rodriguez are ready to go. They were so incredible. Their skill level is already there.

Many directors as they go on -- Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock -- get out of shape. Is it because your wife's on the set that you are so fit? And do you plan on coming out with a Sean Baker Bakes lifestyle book? How to Direct and Keep Your Abs.

(Laughs) Just look. I have to do camera operation, too. You're holding a big camera. . . and Von Trier supposedly does . . . He gets in shape before his shoots because it's quite physically taxing, and especially when my films are always on location. They're not on a nice, comfortable set. We are dealing with the real elements. So I think it's always better to stay physically healthy, especially now, especially with COVID. You know, I think COVID if anything has made me even hit the gym more and pop my vitamin D's.

By the way, is it because of cable TV that audiences are less afraid of seeing penises?

Uh, that I don't know. (Laughs) Yeah, I . . . uh . . . I've heard there's a lot of male nudity now and in some of the series, but I'm not sure how people are going to react because you know you don't see a lot in U.S. cinema these days.

I remember interviewing Peter Greenaway, and he at the time was one of the only directors showing male genitalia. Others shied away, so you might be putting the flag down again like the first man on the moon. You might be popularizing male genitalia for this generation.

I approach it like this. I try to balance it out. You know, if I'm going to be showing female nudity, I'm going to show just as much male nudity, and so that's my approach. And yeah, I'm trying to think of other films that have come out recently with full frontal male nudity.

You're a pioneer.

Yeah.

If a film gets nearly unanimous raves like this one seems to be getting, and let's say it doesn't do big box office, does that hurt your next film in raising money?

I really don't know. I'm still at a budget level where hopefully I'm able to get a budget for the next movie. I'm working way down there. So I look at the careers of like Jim Jarmusch and Spike Lee and Lars Von Trier, and their focus is just about making a good movie, putting a good movie out there, and putting their hearts into a film, and they don't focus on the box office. Now I know A24 may not like that but still you need to focus on the quality of the work and then just hope that you know the box office is there.

There's Oscar nomination chat about Red Rocket. Is A24, your distributor, coming out with an awards campaign? Are you nervous about that? Are you are going to be sitting with your therapist the morning of the Oscar announcements?

No. No. No. No. Look I think if. . . if . . . I know there's a a focus on Simon right now, and I think that's a wonderful thing. He deserves it. His performance is incredible. And hey! If he can go all the way, let's watch him take that ride, and I'll be there to support him. As for the second part of your question, no! I'm definitely not . . . That's definitely not on my mind when it comes to making movies.

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A New Hitchcock Moves into 10 Cloverfield Lane

Brandon Judell — Sat, 12 Mar 2016 00:16:30 +0000

A New Hitchcock Moves into 10 Cloverfield Lane Brandon Judell March 11, 2016 - 19:16

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"It's a real potboiler that is boiling and boiling and boiling and erupts in a way that few films ever do," director Dan Trachtenberg, 34, exclaimed over his first full-length feature, 10 Cloverfield Lane. Well, it's certainly hard to argue with him.

From the opening Psycho-fueled moments to the allusions to Notorious to the surprising twist of a finale, it's hard to recall a recent film that made squirming in one's seat such a pleasurable pastime. Produced with a sure hand by J.J. Abrams, with a relentlessly unnerving score by Bear McCreary, razor-sharp editing by Stefan Grube, and wry plotting by Josh Campbell and Matthew Stuecken, there is a reason the audience at the screening I attended spilled its popcorn every which way. These folks were freaking out but without having to be exposed to the full panoply of gore and excessive physical violence that most horror films apply with a trowel. Trachtenberg and pals were going for exquisitely psychological traumas, and they succeeded in spades.

The saga commences with a glum young woman, Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), driving away from a broken relationship only to find herself awakening numerous hours later chained to a cot. Her body's bruised and her cell phone's without reception. Then the thick metal door of her cell opens, and her aging, bulky, jovial savior Howard (John Goodman in an award-worthy performance) enters and announces, "I saved your life by bringing you here." But did he?

Ask Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.), a not terribly bright guy with a broken arm, who's Michelle's age, early thirtes. He's also there, there being a rather well-stocked underground shelter with a jukebox. And there the trio will have to remain for years because Howard says life isn't supportable aboveground. But what proof does he have? Is he even sane? Emmett believes so, but...?

So why did Abrams choose a rather unknown entity to helm this "blood-relative" to his 2008 box-office hit, Cloverfield? The answer's in Trachtenberg's short, Portal: No Escape, which has garnered over seventeen million online views, and don't overlook his five-and-a-half-minute Black Box TV short, "More than You Can Chew," a vampiric suspenser. This Philadelpia native who's transplanted to Los Angeles certainly knows how to build suspense and supply a payoff that is exciting without being derisibly generic.

Tractenberg's engaging talent might be the result of enveloping himself in the cinematic classics of the past along with the video games of recent decades (e.g. Dark Void; Fallout).

"I really love movies and video games and comic books and all that stuff equally," he insisted in his tasteful, new elbow-patched sports jacket. We were in his suite on the thirty-ninth floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel on Columbus Circle. He sat on a sofa in front of a wall of windows with the curtains pushed aside, allowing the sun to pour in and blind me and no doubt his other interviewers that day. For our whole chat I could not see Trachtenberg's head, only a ray of light streaming from his neck. It was as if I were communing with a prophet of God.

And the prophet held forth more on his influences: "It's all the stuff that fueled my childhood. Recently video games have become real beautiful artistic experiences rather than just bits of competition. That's why I've been just so inspired by games more often recently. And frankly I was able to play more video games while I was making this movie than watch other movies.

"So that was more at the top of my brain," Trachtenberg continued, "but I love movies, and I don't know that I really have the brain of Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese. I don't have as encyclopedic a knowledge, but I do have my own specific set of experiences. And I did grow up loving Hitchcock, but really I was a huge lover of Hong Kong action cinema, and I loved John Woo, and Jackie Chan, and Tsui Hark, and that whole era in the Nineties of Hong Kong action filmmaking, and that really blew me away. That's really when I clocked into what an auteur was.

"Especially with John Woo's movies, there was a rhythm and a style that was as exciting to me as the content. And my jaw was on the floor when I saw Hard Boiled (1992) for the first time. I could not believe what I was seeing. I called my parents in: 'Look at this. This is insane what we are seeing!' So I have these very specific tastes in movies, but I don't know that I could reference Italian neorealism like Scorsese could or any of those, but I do love all movies for sure," he concluded.

I then noted that he was very humble in past interviews about his command of language. He said is strength was his "sight," his vision of what could make a scene work.

"I'm really not a wordsmith," Trachtenberg responded. "I just never really had the right words. Frankly, I just really enjoy working with other people. I love working with my writer the same way I love working with my editor and cinematographer and production designer.

"I find myself often going through this rhythm of there being something that I know exactly how I want it to be because I think it will be really exciting to be a certain way. It represents me. And then there are some things that I only have a vague sense of how they should feel like, but I don't exactly know how as of yet. Then I really need that conversation with that person who is specifically hyper-skilled in that one category to help me arrive at that point where I find that thing that I think is really awesome, and that they think is really awesome. I really do love embracing other people's talents and their sight for their specific thing, and having them take ownership over it and be excited over that something that is new in that category."

Talking about the new, how come Trachtenberg has ditched his trademark baseball cap and plaid flannel shirts of his past? Has success caused him to want to be a bit more stylish? Will he soon start dressing all in black like Fassbender did?

"That all comes from being married to such a wonderful woman who helps you out with such things," the director explained, alluding to his wife of five years. "I'm not Sam Raimi showing up to set in a suit every day, but I'm also not schlubbing it up either. I sort of shake it up every day with whatever I feel like."

And with the laudatory reviews 10 Cloverfield Lane is receiving, those schlub days might be gone forever.

At Lincoln Center: Pedro Costa and His War on Narrative Film

Brandon Judell — Thu, 30 Jul 2015 03:56:01 +0000

At Lincoln Center: Pedro Costa and His War on Narrative Film Brandon Judell July 29, 2015 - 23:56

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In 1997, Pedro Costa (above), at the age of 38, began a trilogy exploring Portugal's impoverished, an undertaking that would continuously draw raves from the more erudite critics around the world. First came Ossos, which was pursued by In Vanda's Room (2000) and Colossal Youth (2006). These films, often showcasing the same characters, are sublimely visual, meditative masterworks that paint within shadows the seemingly plotless lives of the drug-addled inhabitants of a ghetto that is slowly being dismantled.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center last week had a retrospective of these early works plus other tidbits of Costa's oeuvre, a sort of celluloid foreplay leading to the release of Costa's latest effort, Horse Money. The accompanying press release for this tribute notes that "Costa is now widely regarded as one of the most important artists on the international film scene," and the Film Society's Director of Programming, Dennis Lim, added, "Simply put, nobody makes films like him -- both in terms of his radical methodology and the ravishing results."

This is clearly a sounding of the trumpet for those hungry for a more challenging cinema. Yes, if Antonioni's Red Desert (1964) or Clare Denis's Beau Travail (1999) tickle your fancy, Costa's handiwork might be right up your alley. But, warns Costa aficionado Eric Kohn of indieWire in one review, although the rewards are great, the helmer's "lengthy exchanges are tough to endure." The A.V. Club's Scott Tobias notes, in his review of The Criterion Collection of the above films, there is an "unrelieved tediousness that comes as a consequence to his rejection of any and all narrative architecture." Meanwhile, Jamie S. Rich on his blog, Criterion Confessions, adds that Costa is "a bit of a difficult puzzle."

Of the three, Ossos is easily Costa's most approachable work and his last to utilize the common equipment and techniques of "Hollywood" filmmaking. In the Fontainhas district of Lisbon, immigrants from the former colonies of Portugal are scavenging out a survival, but like the gone-to-ruin buildings they reside in, the gone-to-ruin souls have little chance of triumphing.

Here Tina (Maria Lipinka) has just given birth. Leaving the hospital, she states in disbelief, "I came here as one." Her baby seems to be not a joyful addition to her existence but a cutting away of her flesh. Returning to her achromatic home, she lays the infant down on a couch, drags over a gas tank, turns the knob, and waits for the end. Her endeavor miscarries.

The father (Nuno Vaz) eventually shows up and absconds with the child, which he hopes to use as a beggar's tool, and if that fails, the kid's up for purchase.

Trying to remedy the situation is Tina's neighbor Clotilde (the remarkable Vanda Duarte), a housecleaner who threatens the dad with murder if he hurts her friend.

What follows is a series of long and moderate takes, often wordless, which are remarkable in their passive beauty. Costa doesn't so much direct a scene as he paints a scene. There's a shot where the young man places his head under a kitchen faucet to gulp water and another where the camera sidles up to him as he walks down a rather long street with the unseen baby in a bag. There is no need for dialogue. The shots tell all while creating a sense of foreboding and at times a sleepy sexual tension. The film is riveting.

The 170-minute-long In Vanda's Room surprisingly, or maybe not, surpasses Ossos in its enveloping visual appeal. Seldom has the unlit, mundane world of the penniless been so seductive. Shooting with a digital video camera, Costa returned to Fontainhas to chronicle the final moments of its inhabitants as their buildings are torn down one by one.

Vanda Duarte stars as Vanda Duarte, which has caused more than a few critics to designate this effort as a documentary, while others have sidled up to the term docu-fiction. Duarte, who is lean and curveless with an embattled allurement, is the centerpiece here, lying on her seldom-left bed, noting, "This is good smack!" Otherwise, she's helping a friend unravel a crewel of yarn, cutting up coke, or listening to gossip: "He's staying where that girl lived who killed her baby." One visitor offers up his finch for sale.

Peopled with nonprofessional actors, some just there to show off their vastly compelling visages, an episode might follow where a man is showering in the shadows with only his silhouette visible. Another has a young gent sitting in a blackness with only his crutches and the sandwich he is eating visible. Suddenly, he beseeches a higher power with "May the Lord help me." Other times empty rooms will be viewed by a static camera as a cacophony of smashing cranes and sledgehammering workers fills up the soundtrack.

The effect is hypnotic, and the film ends as it opens without a rationale, or maybe that is the rationale: that there is no true start or conclusion to these lives, just an unending continuance. And when one dies, she will be replaced . . .or not.

Colossal Youth (2006) continues the saga with several of the same characters, but the focus here is on septuagenarian Ventura, who wanders about from the remnants of Fontainhas district to the antiseptic housing projects where he is being offered an apartment. To and fro he treads, communing with his children, one of whom is Vanda. But are they his children?

Early on, outside a shut door, he declares in a monotone delivery to one of his daughters, "Your mother's gone. She doesn't want to spend the rest of her life with me. She doesn't want to move to the new place. She fought me every night. It's been like a nightmare . . . . Every time your mother gave birth, she'd pray it wouldn't be a drunk like me."

A voice replies, "Ventura, you got the wrong door."

Later on, when he tells Vanda about his marital strife with her mom, she notes her mother is buried in a cemetery.

Once again, as noted by Reehan on his blog, "Distant Voices," Costa is continuing in his obliteration of "the behemoth that is the narrative cinema." But if you're not already a fan of Costa by now, joyfully mainlining on his existential aesthetic, you's better sidestep this one.

Now comes Horse Money (2014), an unnecessary addition to the Fontainhas trilogy, and one unequal in execution. Costa has exchanged docu-fiction for pedestrian enactments of one man's non compos mentis musings. Ventura is back again, locked in an infirmary of sorts. When asked his age, he replies, "Nineteen and three months." When lying in bed, he converses with the friends, co-workers, and fellow revolutionaries of his past life, all dead.

Ventura playing Ventura in Horse Money.

Later, he is stuck in an elevator with a soldier holding a rifle whose flesh is painted a sort of dark silvery gray. In this rather longish scene, Ventura recites his prayers: "Our Lord of Nazareth. Son of the Holy Mary, taste the Virgin's milk. The Beast's gun is not yours. Prime Minister, bankruptcy." The soldier, whose lips do not move, replies, "You're worshipping Satan, boy?!"

Little of the film makes sense, and that probably was Costa's intention. In fact, at last year's New York Film Festival, the venue's interviewer told the director, "I've seen the film now three times and I really don't feel I have a grasp of it."

Costa replied that he himself was only now, when chatting about Horse Money, trying to unearth its purport: "I didn't have time to think about it when I was doing it."

So if you are in the mood for self-indulgent befuddlement, although a befuddlement with grand intentions, the summing of up an impoverished life and world, run on over to Lincoln Center.

However, if you want to discover a unique voice and a transformative cinema, seek out the Fontainhas trilogy released now, as noted, on DVD as part of The Criterion Collection.

Cine-Simenon

Brandon Judell — Thu, 15 Aug 2013 04:26:57 +0000

Cine-Simenon Brandon Judell August 15, 2013 - 00:26

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The Belgian-born Georges Simenon (1903-1989) wrote over 200 novels (by Wikipedia's count) plus many shorter works. The New York Times estimates that number (including his memoirs and nonfiction works) as being between 400 and 500. Simenon's creation, Inspector Jules Maigret, who appeared in about 75 works, "ranks only after Sherlock Holmes as the world's best known fictional detective." (I'm not sure how Poirot feels about that.) Of course, such popularity could not be overlooked by the entertainment industry, and imdb.com has compiled a list of 132 movies and TV shows based on his oeuvre. And now the Anthology Archives, with Kathy Geritz and the Pacific Film Archive, is presenting 14 of these celluloid joys within the series appropriately entitled Cine-Simenon: George Simenon on Film, which runs until August 21st.

Before viewing the celluloid Simenon, I decided to nestle down with the textural Simenon, and within a week, I had plowed through five of his works, four featuring Maigret, all covered in this separate review. An addiction had been born.

So what's so habit-forming about this portly, pipe-smoking, happily wed, and at-times guilt-ridden fictional crime solver? In his novel No Vacation for Maigret (1953), Simenon writes, "To tell the truth Maigret had never been very hot on footprints, fingerprints, and the like. As a general rule he left such things to the 'experts.'" Yes, our investigator time after time exposes his villains by an uncanny instinct and an unrelenting doggedness. Often, he senses who the guilty party is in the second or third chapter, and then has to spend the rest of the book fleshing out his theory, unlike Agatha Christie, who springs her villain on you only in the penultimate chapter.

I was able to view six of the films included in Cine-Simenon:

A Man's Neck/La Tete d'un homme (1933)

One of the best offerings in the series, and one speculated to have inspired Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, is Julien Divivier's fast-paced, exquisitely shot psychodrama that concerns Joseph Huertin (Alexandre Rignault), an impoverished, bovine man-on-the-outs, who's convinced to a rob an old lady's apartment by a rather persuasive stranger. This stranger is none other than Radek (the superb Valery Inkijinoff), a fellow penniless soul, who has overheard a gent at a local café jokingly claim that he'd pay anyone 100,000 francs to kill his rich, old aunt. Radek takes him up on the offer, commits the crime, and frames Huertin. Will Maigret (Harry Baur, above) fall for the scam, especially with Huertin's bloody fingerprints everywhere? What's especially delicious here are the remnants of silent filmmaking scattered about, especially in the long close-ups and the unforgettable finale. Radek's rantings against the spoiled upper classes are an added bonus.

The Man on the Eiffel Tower (1949)

Utilizing the same novel, La Tête d'un homme, that A Man's Neck employed, this troubled American production is inferior in every manner, from the uneven acting by the supporting cast to the use of a dummy falling off the Eiffel Tower, yet at the same time, the tale is never less than intriguing. With star Burgess Meredith drafted into the director's role at the final moment (Charles Laughton threatened to walk off the set otherwise), Huerton (Meredith) is now an extremely nearsighted knife sharpener who turns gullible thief. Franchot Tone, who also financed the film, is the madman Radek, who lives with his mother when not murdering folk. However, here his motives are not so Marxian. This Radek considers himself a genius, one who can outwit Maigret (Laughton) plus his former professors and classmates. Sometimes, he'd predict the latter's deaths: "You will die in one year," and they did. Stymied by its low budget, this effort still entertains with its views of a post-War Paris and its battle of the minds.

Monsieur Hire (1989)

Michel Blance stars as the tiny, balding, highly unlikable Hire, a tailor with a passion for a young woman, Alice (Sandrine Bonnaire), whose window faces his own. One day she catches him peeping in, but that doesn't stop her from undressing, sleeping, or making love in front of his stare. In fact, she encourages Hire's voyeurism and even wants to make contact with him. (The spilled-tomatoes-on-the-staircase scene between the two is an unforgettable ode to seduction.) There's one problem. A local police inspector believes Hire is responsible for a recent murder of a damsel in the park. So who's in more danger now? Alice or her admirer? Helmer Patrice Leconte's early effort is one of his best.

Betty (1992)

When Simenon suggested to Claude Chabrol over lunch that he make a film without a plot because unlike novels, cinema's a truly visual medium that just needs a face, Chabrol took him up and adapted the master's Betty, a tale without much forward motion that is nonetheless engaging. Marie Trintignant stars in the titular role as a self-destructive femme fatale who one rainy evening, while drinking nonstop, allows herself to be picked up by a much older doctor, who drives her to a secluded restaurant, The Hole, for dinner. There she's befriended by Laure (Stephane Audran), a lonely, wealthy widow, who helps rescue Betty from her date, who turns out to be a bit insane, and installs the now unconscious girl into a room next to her own in a luxury hotel. Will Betty ever leave? Drifting back and forth in time, step by incremental step, we discover Betty's past: her lovers, her husband, his extremely well-heeled in-laws, her children, and her hedonism. So what happened to poor Betty? Is she a saint or a sinner? And will Laure survive once she finds out? Although I'm fan, The Washington Post's Megan Rosenfeld was not at the time this offering opened: "Trintignant brings little to the role beyond her beauty, including a curvaceous figure (fully visible). Even her tears seem painted on." You decide.

The Bottom of the Bottle (1956)

After the war, Simenon was being accused of possibly being too friendly to the Germans, so he packed off to America and wound up in Arizona, scribing the source material for this adequate Henry Hathaway offering. (Hathaway directed it three years after Niagara with Monroe and eight years before Of Human Bondage with Kim Novak.) The "sexy" blond here is the often shirtless Van Johnson, who stars as the on-the-wagon Donald, an escaped prisoner on the run. You see, while drunk, he bumped off a chap who was about to attack him. Seeking help, this apparently nice chap winds up at his highly respected, rich brother P.M.'s ranch. The problem now arises that P.M. (Joseph Cotton) has never briefed anyone that he has a sibling, not even his wife Nora (Ruth Roman). So Donald's introduced as P.M.'s old pal who becomes insane when he drinks. Not unexpectedly, everyone wants to see the man get soused. However, all Donald wants to do is get his boots into Mexico and be reunited with his own wife and three kids. P.M., who's only concerned about his reputation, feels no empathy for his kid bro, and you won't care much either thanks to Cotton's performance. It's as if he sent out his shirts to get starched and forgot to get out of them. Roman, though, is terrific. As for the ending, it's very schmaltzy Hollywood -- and very little Simenon.

The Man Who Watched Trains Go By/Paris Express (1952)

This solid adaptation embraces Simenon's favorite archetype, an innocent who mistakenly thinks he has committed some evil act, and then eventually actually does. Claude Rains stars as the loyal, nondescript Dutch bookkeeper Popinga, who lights upon the fact that his employer has embezzled funds for years in order to entertain a Parisian mistress. Consequently, the business Propinga has invested all of his savings in has gone bankrupt. A brief to-do occurs after this discovery, and the little man believes he's killed his boss. Grabbing the swindler's briefcase filled with hundreds of thousands of guilders, Propinga winds up in the City of Lights wooing the very woman who initiated the crimes. Who will get the upper hand? Directed by Harold French, a British stalwart, this little thriller is worth every one of the 82 minutes you'll spend with it.

Click on this link to read my article on his literary career.

Gareth Edwards - The Dusty Wright Show

Dusty Wright — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 14:29:40 +0000

Gareth Edwards - The Dusty Wright Show Dusty Wright November 4, 2010 - 10:29

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UK filmmaker Gareth Edwards discusses his fantastic low-budget sci-fi movie Monsters with host Dusty Wright. (Director of Godzilla, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, too.)

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