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Léolo (1992)
Brilliant and genuinely original.
I absolutely adore this movie.
I first saw it with a group of friends at the local college town art cinema when it was first released. When it ended, hardly anyone in the theater even stirred, slowly and quietly rising only after the credits ran out. Afterwards, we went for drinks, as had been the plan for the evening, but it took a long time for us to break out of the film's spell and begin to really talk. When we finally did, each of us was relieved to find that everyone else had been as moved by it as each had individually.
The reason for all this doubt and anxiety, I believe, is the film itself. It doesn't rely on any conventions at all, nor does it allow the viewer to respond via convention. What it does do is provide the viewer with an intensely private view of the characters. You get to see them in broad daylight at times and on occasions where one would most want to be absolutely alone. Because of this willingness to really expose its characters, a more honest self-relation is demanded in response and for a response. (In this respect in reminds me a bit of Milan Kundera's novels, during the reading of which I often find myself embarrassed for the characters that I am there intruding on their privacy.) I think what myself and my friends (then still young adults) feared was revealing something about ourselves--a kind of fragility and ambivalence in one's own self-relation that one normally represses, but which this film repeatedly draws to the surface. Wouldn't admitting that one was moved by these characters be also an admission that one could relate to them in some more profound way? Yes, and I have felt just a little bit less alone in the world since seeing Leolo. Not better perhaps, but less alone.
A truly great, great movie. Rent it on VHS, grab a Canadian DVD off of Ebay, or pester IFC to show it again (record it because you'll want to see it again), but don't miss it.
The Stranger (1946)
A Nazi architect of the Shoah, known only by name, is pursued by a Nazi hunter in post-war New England.
The Stranger is a remarkable film for several reasons. One is that it demonstrates Orson Welles' considerable talent for designing interesting lighting effects, for wonderful visual composition, and for creating an atmosphere pregnant with menacing possibilities. Second, is that it contains film footage (however brief and sanitized) of corpses "manufactured" in the Shoah (more widely known as the Nazi Holocaust). In this connection, it also plainly presents Nazism as essentially anti-Semitic, and even contains mention of concentration camps and gas chambers.
The latter of these two reasons may seem unremarkable now, but as a student of the Shoah and the history of its handling in popular culture, I was stunned to find this issue addressed in such a direct manner in a Hollywood movie from 1946. After all, even documentaries concerning the Shoah, a decade or more removed from those events, barely mentioned that the principle victims of the Shoah were Jews (see "Night and Fog", Alain Resnais' otherwise excellent 1956 effort). Fears of post-war indifference due to anti-Semitism even led Simon Wiesenthal to spread the untruth that as many as six million non-Jewish people perished in the Holocaust (of the 6-7 million estimated killed, the vast majority were Jews).
Perhaps it is this treatment of the Shoah, and the chance to play a Nazi-hunter, that explains the presence of Edward G. Robinson in this picture (he was born a Romanian Jew named Emanuel Goldenberg). The presence of this immensely talented actor begs for an explanation, sadly, because aside from the reasons noted above, the film is simply terrible.
The writing, acting (even from Robinson), and direction are about as subtle as a poke in the eye. Every predictable emotion and obvious motive by every character is announced in ridiculously overplayed gestures and movements, accompanied by tedious, wooden dialog, and then explained outright to the audience in yet still more tedious dialog. Imagine Citizen Kane remade using a version of the script that was designed to make the plot and all the characters easily and fully understood by dull-witted eight year olds who suffer from attention deficit disorder. (No offense to such people, I just don't want to see movies made with them as the target audience.) In the mini biography of the screenwriter Victor Trivas here at IMDb, it suggests that he was nominated for an Oscar for his work on this film. If that is true, the Academy Awards very narrowly missed its own Milli Vanilli scandal (the popular music group that won a Grammy only to have it revealed that the "artists" so awarded did not actually do their own singing). Either Trivas regarded movie goers as complete idiots, was himself a complete idiot, or had his work ruined by complete idiots. This screenplay is simply terrible, and even great acting and direction (neither in evidence here) could have saved this movie from being lousy because of it.
If you are a fan of the film noir cycle for its visual style only, an Orson Welles completist, or interested in popular culture treatments of the Shoah, check it out. Otherwise, I would recommend two hours of random television viewing first.