Reviews

A German road movie, almost 3 hours long, with no dialogue for the first 20 minutes. A man with a truck-rolling beard (Rüdiger Vogler) and a heartbroken man, (Hanns Zischler), just wander around the frontier of East and West Germany. The film was shot without a scenario. All screens are shot and seen at the same time, and disappear as soon as they are seen. There is no past in this film. There is no future either. There is not even a trace that the film was made. Everything is in the present, happening and passing away before your eyes. Just like the scenery you see from a train window.

If I had to pick a good point, it would be that it's not complicated at all.

In this film, everything is straightforward and direct. The golden penis is not a metaphor, but capitalism itself. The Marxist woman seducing the boy, the act of eating and throwing back food, they are not all symbols of anything.

The milk, the sugar is made in the United States, the cocoa beans are "extracted" from Africa, and the mixture is a confection called "chocolate". Even that is an obvious it "itself". But I don't think that the woman, naked and covered in chocolate, is "depicting the world". The author simply names the thing she presents as "the world," and there is not a single world as we know it.

Paradoxically, if you dismiss all of this as a kind of performance, it's all quite enjoyable, but even so, none of the cast members had enough charm to pull the film along, and that's not because of the acting, but because of the poor casting and direction.

"Anonimo Veneziano" is the name of the oboe concerto, but perhaps he is referring to the protagonist or his wife. It's a very specific film that encapsulates the kind of marital rebirth depicted in "Viaggio in Italia" in a single day in Venice, but it's extremely disappointing that the film didn't get any more recognition than its theme song and the episodes surrounding it.

The performances of the two actors are excellent. This is not only because the two actors play the folds of the human psyche and the subtleties of human emotions with great finesse. They are wonderful in their own right. As actor-director, Enrique Maria Salerno narrows down the characters to an extremely abstract level. The fact that important characters (e.g., his two sons) only appear in dialogue is an example of this. It's as if they are the only two people who exist here in Venice. This is accentuated by the editing, where the landscape, cityscape and buildings are the focus of long shots, even though they are in the middle of the dialogue. We are forced to accept the sadness of the last sequence, but it is also directed at the end of the film's duration.

"Senso" is an early masterpiece by Luchino Visconti. In layman's terms, the film, set in Venice - Ardeno - Verona at the end of the 19th century, tells the story of an affair between a countess on the defeated side and an Austrian military officer from the occupying power, and the highlights of the film are the opulent sets, art and costumes, the large number of extras and the performances of the two leads. The production, with very few close-ups and mainly fixture shots, is extremely rigorous and precise. From the point of view of the current audience, Visconti uses the mob scene merely as a backdrop to show the process of their "depravity," and in that light, the director's interest may have been more in the individual's state of mind than in the history of the film. It is interesting that the two characters are diametrically opposed in every aspect of their sex, position, and status, yet they take the same poor actions. They are two sides of a coin, if you will.

The story of this movie is extremely clichéd. And like a Sexploitation film, most of the screen time is spent in nude or sex scenes. But the sea (French) and garden (Portuguese) locations, the extravagant mansions and the gorgeous women with great skin, the art and the beauty of the cinematography make it one of the best films of its kind. Unfortunately, right now, it's about as far as retro and a little intense softcore films go, but the people of the 30th century will understand the beauty of the film and "Jess Franco retrospective" will be a staple at film festival.

A contrast between chocolates and wine. The two pianists and the president, Isabelle Huppert, who presumably took over the family business, and her son, who is not related to her by blood. The sadness of their inability to assert their existence without potentially running into "evil" explodes quietly in the ending. Just as the son feels his father's disappointment and becomes apathetic, Huppert continues to tame her own malice unconsciously. She is ultimately caught up in the "evil" and has no choice but to cower, but Claude Chabrol's perspective on the defeated is very tender.