rrizzo@bbncca.ARPA (Ron Rizzo) (05/11/84)
I saw two French films with unusually sour views of life, etc. that I thought were very good: 1. Bernard Blier's GOING PLACES (1974?), in which the very young Gerard Depardieu and Patrick De Waere play two amoral louts who briefly terrorize a strip of northern France, raping, stealing & murdering as they go (& pick- ing up Jeanne Moreau along the way). I usually react to such a film (eg., The Wild Ones, Mad Max, etc,. ad nauseam) with thoughts like "bad taste is inexhaustible", but in this case I simply felt GP was one of the best (& more profound) movies of the last 15 years or more. The film apparently caused a scandal: feminists & others were enraged about the murderous sexism rather brazenly depicted. Has anyone else out there see the picture? 2. Bertrand Tavernier's CLEAN SLATE (COUP DE TORCHON, 1982/3?) casts Philippe Noiret as a colonial administrator in French Equatorial Africa in the 1930s, and Isabelle Huppert as a kind of waif who helps murder her husband. The film contains what could be considered violent racism, but as unpleasant as the movie's main process was (seeing the world through the eyes of an increasingly demented mass killer), it struck me as an unusually serious and powerful film. Anyone care to comment or give their reactions to this one? Finally, bad films that are inadvertently good when viewed as satire: When I saw Woody Allen's INTERIORS, I assumed it was meant as a black comedy and thought to myself, "What a wicked sendup (long overdue) of Bergman & Scandinavian angst-cum-ecstasy! This is Woody's best movie!" But when Maureen Stapleton entered midway as Pearl, it suddenly dawned on me with horror that it was a serious flick! To this day I still re- gard Allen as a kind of nitwit. Other films in this category: Bergman's CRIES & WHISPERS, Bridges' MIKE'S MURDER, BETRAYAL (??).... Am I weirdly misperceiving these films, or are they really bad, made ridiculous by directors' overseriousness & pretension? I thought INTERIORS was ludicrous. Did anyone else? Cheers, Ron Rizzo