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Chris N
Reviews
Le château de ma mère (1990)
Heartrendingly beautiful, sad, and satisfying
My Mother's Castle is the distilled essence of nostalgia for lost childhood - we see the hero's story in a golden light of memory, where the desserts are always the most tempting that could ever be, and the dishes never get dirty. The cinematography is stunning - the exact evocation of that warm and golden place in our memories. And the ending is, like it says - stunning, satisfying, perfect. I just love this movie - it's one of life's little miracles.
Posledniye kanikuly (1996)
Teen Agers Go Bad in Seventies USSR
Last Holiday was shown at the San Francisco Film Festival in May 1999. Said to be the first US screening. This is a quintessential teenage bad boys genre film, and very good of the kind. Story follows three lads as they progress from guzzling vodka and smoking dope to robbing the local bar of its disco lights and then on to murder, death by police brutality, prison and more before they have to go back to school. Ya-hoo!!
Director gets superb performances from the teens, photography is fine. The opening shot is memorable - a concrete apartment building in a snowstorm. The camera dollies in from about a block away to an apartment window just as a teenager opens it, and moves on into the apartment where the youth are partying. It's not a bit like Orson Welles in spite of this description, and well worth seeing for its technical brilliance. Story has that firm fatalistic cast that rarely gets beyond international film festivals. Well worth seeing if you enjoy this sort of thing and get a chance. Oh yes, The film is set in mid-Seventies and I think there is another layer that I didn't get - a barbed look at the Motherland just before dissolution.
Golubinyj zvonar (1994)
A simple love story sublimely shot
Who is Karakulov's D.P.? He/she is a brilliant lighter and has a magnificent understanding of how low light plays on film stocks. This film is just a stoner to look at.
The story is sort of early nineteenth century style passionate young love, passionate young death all ratcheted up to the level of Kabuki. Or maybe Verdi. For all that, the story and characters are just sketched in - an excuse for the most passionate, lush lighting and photography.
Story, what there is of it, follows the love affair between a young man and a young woman! New idea, eh?
She dies untimely, he goes into a major depression, ends up stabbing somebody (I think), and waiting for the police to carry him away. But the story doesn't matter. The shooter must have studied Vermeer and those other seventeenth century Dutch guys before he made this movie. He/she makes the whitewashed interiors of the peasant cottage that is the primary set into pure classic seventeenth century painting. It's just mesmerizing, single source of light light painting.
The film played at the San Francisco Film Festival in May, 1999 and, at that time, had not been subtitled in English. Which is good, because the film is all about classically beautiful pictures, and subtitles would only smudge up the frame.