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Dans la ville de Sylvia (2007)
A film for people watchers
I've selected "may contain spoilers" although I'm not entirely sure you could spoil the experience of watching this in anyway by describing the entire "narrative". Boy sees girl, boy follows girl, boy finally talks to girl. Nothing much happens. I've given it 10 out of 10. That's 10 out of 10 if you're a people watcher of course! The observational skills required of the viewer remind me of the opening scene in the airport in Jacques Tati's "Playtime". I thought when I read the synopsis that it would be hard going but the time just flew by and the credits appeared all too soon.
There have been discussions about the film being voyeurism, that it seeks to ogle women in the disguise of an art film. This is not how it struck me. The photography is ravishing and the actors are very beautiful I grant you, but the film as art idea that Guerin is pursuing here means it is inevitable that we look at beauty. Surely the boy is just as beautiful anyway. Are we voyeurs when we enter an art gallery or are we just innocent viewers who like beauty? It's an ongoing discussion between two points of view which will never see eye to eye and so is a redundant criticism of this film. I sense the dead hand of excessive Political Correctness here.
Yes there are continuity errors people (what film hasn't), his jacket disappears between one shot and another at one stage for example. My point would be that it doesn't really matter. It doesn't impinge on the experience.
Has he made a mistake or is she just trying to deny her way out of renewing the acquaintance? I wasn't sure that it was a mistake, he seems so certain. As in Haneke's "Hidden" Guerin does not provide us with a definitive answer. In this style of cinema, and I agree with the comments about this being film as art, who needs answers! Certainly not everybody's type of film, one or two walked out at the NFT3 viewing I was at, but for those of us prepared to put in the level of concentration required it was pure delight.
Journal d'un curé de campagne (1951)
If there's an opposite of melodramatic then this is it!
Much has been said already in these comments about the religious aspects of this film and I tend to agree with most of what has been said. So I wish to focus on other aspects of this film.
I have long wanted to see Journal d'un curé de campagne after reading the curious write-up it gets in Halliwell's Film Guide. I was struggling for a little while with the style but from about a third of the way in I was transfixed and am looking forward to watching it again now. The only reason I don't give it a higher rating is that I feel that it is perhaps about 20-30 minutes too long.
Claude Laydu's wonderfully understated performance (so natural that the term "performance" is almost an exaggeration) underpins this film, but alongside this are the wonderfully unaffected portrayals Bresson gets from, among others, André Guibert and Martine Lemaire (both appearing in their one and only film according to this database) as the fellow priest and catechism class member respectively.
Although on the whole the proceedings are very understated there is a moment of high drama when the young priest takes on La Comtesse, over the way she is coping with a bereavement, quite a scene!
In my view it is important in any film or play that at least one of the characters has our sympathy and Laydu carries you along with him. You genuinely feel a shaft of light has come through the clouds when he meets Oscar and gets a lift to the station. At last a friend amongst these awful parishioners, but all too late.
I've seen many a great film and this is up there with the best.
I'm only sorry that the Criterion DVD is in USA format. You need an NTSC compatible TV to view it.