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Frère et soeur (2014)
Takes you back to childhood
A beautiful documentary, ''Brother and Sister'' lets us be part of the lives of Marie and Cyril for eighteen months, and see the world through the eyes of children again, a world of certainties and make-belief.
The kids themselves don't seem to notice the camera at all (with one exception, when Marie whispers into her brother's ear, ''We're going to be in a film!''). They are completely uninhibited, natural. They plan and quarrel, they laugh and cry, they play games (and the piano).
We see vignettes of these eighteen months, those small inconsequential moments of childhood, that are both unimportant and everything. Adults are never fully seen, they are blurred, mostly in the off-screen-space, their faces never visible, there through their voices, but not their physical presence. The focus here is on the children.
In voice-overs, that are scattered across the documentary, Marie and Cyril talk about their ideas and plans, about the other.
Certain images will stay in your head, like a little boy, red in the face, pressing his lips together and shaking with suppressed laughter during a concert, like his sister, grimacing , wrinkling her nose over a bowl of vegetable soup, like two children lying under a wind turbine, wondering if the blades could break free, and fall.
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936)
Wonderful.
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
Capra just knew how to do it. The 30s were his decade, and by the end of it, he had 3 Academy Awards to call his own (and may even have won one more for Mr Smith, if it wasn't for Gone with the Wind). Everything about this movie is perfect. The pacing, the dialogue, the acting, the plot.
Gary Cooper is wonderful as the idealistic small town tuba player who inherits a small fortune and has to move to the big city, where he'll soon become ''the victim of every conniving crook in town''. Like most of Capra's heroes, he's a playful man-child who slides down bannisters, chases fire engines and grins on hearing echoes. And although he's not as naive as the lawyer Mr Cedar initially hopes, he's genuinely confused by the cynic attitudes of the people around him. Cooper plays beautifully, is convincingly bashful, funny and heartbroken over the course of the film, and really deserved his Academy Award (the close-up of Longfellow's reaction on hearing of Babe's betrayal is especially praiseworthy).
But having said that, Jean Arthur's performance is equally brilliant as the cynic reporter who worms her way into Deeds's confidence and writes insulting articles about the ''Cinderella Man'' behind his back, only to fall in love with him herself. Babe's transformation is utterly credible, and beautifully done, so you can't help but root for her in the end.
The rest of the cast is superb too, of course, particularly Lionel Stander, George Bancroft and Ruth Donnelly.
Mr Deeds is Capra's first film where he consciously tries to bring across his ideas to the public, ideas which champion the little man, the insignificant man, the individualist.
I first saw this at the age of 14, and it just blew me away, because it's just so much more sophisticated than the majority of the comedies produced today (although Mr Deeds can't really be classified as just a comedy – that's another wonderful thing about it.) Anyway, it was this film that got me into all the classics of the 30s and 40s, and then eventually, into all kinds of films in general.