All Slights Deserved

There's a gimmick that's gained prominence in cinema over the past decade that I find increasingly irksome. It cropped up in La casa muda just last week and here it is again, albeit Haute Tension preempted the Uruguayan film by several years. Let's call that gimmick EYTYKIW: Everything You Think You Know Is Wrong. Now EYTYKIW is a somewhat different creature to the twist ending, which has been with us ever since cavemen began sitting around the fire telling stories. Twist endings are the final snap in a story, a little surprise to muse over afterwards. By contrast EYTYKIW typically comes at some point during the third act and gleefully exposes the artifice of narrative; those logical assumptions we've made while reading or watching a story. The interesting thing about EYTYKIW is it can be effective without necessarily being that much of a surprise. Anybody with a passing knowledge of old school psycho-thrillers won't have been taken aback by Scorsese's Sh...

If yesterday's film Bigger Than Life represented an affront to civilised, bourgeois values, then superficially Themroc should have society's moral guardians calling for martial law. The trouble is that while Claude Faraldo's satire takes iconoclasm to its logical extreme, it does so in a manner that favours the ridiculous over the subversive. The result is an oddity that might be novel, even mildly amusing, but doesn't pose much of a threat from the margins. Michel Piccoli, an actor whose name might as easily be a byword for seventies art cinema, stars as the eponymous anti-hero; an atavistic factory worker. Living in a dilapidated tenement with his nagging mother and a girl who's apparently his sister; Themroc's existence is clearly one of repetitive daily grind. After a confrontation with his boss at work he snaps and returns home to start tearing apart the flat and bricking up the entrance so he can live like a modern-day caveman. Before long Themroc...

I didn't realise while watching it that Claire Denis's Beau Travil was a loose adaptation of Herman Melville's Billy Budd , but wasn't terribly surprised. Beneath the oblique veneer lies a nineteenth century morality tale in a military setting vaguely reminiscent of Tolstoy. The story is relocated to the present day and a regiment of French Foreign Legion troops stationed in Djibouti. Galoup (Denis Lavant), a committed but somewhat sullen staff sergeant, develops a festering jealousy towards Sentain, a popular and good looking new recruit. When Sentain is awarded a medal for bravery in the wake of a helicopter accident Galoup's hatred only grows and he begins trying to unsettle his rival. When an opportunity finally presents itself to discipline Sentain, Galoup takes it too far and destroys his own career. For long stretches very little takes place; much of the narration is told through Galoup's voiceover and the dialogue is sparse; a great deal imparted ...

No country holds the cinema in higher regard as an art form than the French. During a trip to Paris when I was fourteen I recall flicking through the tv channels one morning and stumbling upon a studio-based discussion programme in which intellectuals were vigorously arguing about the films of James Dean. I've no idea whether this was a regular occurrence but needless to say I can't imagine Alan Titchmarsh or Paul o'Grady (c-list daytime celebrities, for the benefit of non-British readers) ever chairing a debate about the work of Montgomery Clift. In fact finding any kind of serious discussion of the arts is a rarity on British television, which is decidedly not the case across the Channel. There's a drawback to such earnestness though; sometimes you can't see the wood for the trees. The French have produced some great films, but there are plenty of others that are stultifyingly dull. A particular object of my enmity are their historical dramas and biopics. Thes...

I'll be the first to admit that when it comes to my film viewing habits I'm a bit of a snob. In the early years I was inclined to seek out the critically acclaimed rather than populist cinema, and although my tastes expanded to include more idiosyncratic material as a rule it's tended to be haute cuisine over meat and potatoes. The drawback of this philosophy is one grows so accustomed to the good stuff it's not always possible to appreciate the value of what you're watching relative to the bigger picture. I suspect this may be why the work of French writer/director Henri-Georges Clouzot has failed to capture me. Clouzot is best remembered for the high-tension truck adventure Wages of Fear and seminal psychological thriller Les Diaboliques ; neither of which which lived up to their reputation. Strangely enough I prefer some of the Hammer studio's shameless rip-offs of Les Diaboliques , such as Scream of Fear , to the original. Seen retrospectively Clouzot...