etoile violette, axelle ropert
her first medium length short. lonesome tailor serge bozon attends night class on french literature, presided over by bald professor in ill-fitting suits who seems more obsessed by rousseau's late life solitude than any specific reading. he listens to call in radio shows, deals with clients, hallucinates meetings in the woods with the elderly rosseau. more than anything a film about loneliness and the possibility of finding a peer group around a found interest, which is a guess telling for a group of writer/directors who convened around a film magazine. form is more like bozon's mods (which she wrote, and shares celine bozon as dp) than her later, lusher films like tirez la langue. loved it i think.
the little match girl, alejo moguillansky
moguillansky bringing his mix of dramatic material, documentary footage, c ollaborative hybrid stuff, and obsession with arts workers and finance together as elegantly as i think he ever has? i kind of miss the weird edges of a
parrot and the swan but think this is an amazing and underrated movie. its a dense hour and 15 minutes or so, but very funny and warm, can't recommend enough if it hasn't been on your radar yet.
politzeiruf 110: smoke on the water, dominik graf
can't quite see this as the sex comedy that olaf moller described this as! but it's a very mean european crime thing, in the politicized post manchette mode, with graf's ability to push a scene with very specific/mean cultural observation making everything more interesting. what seems like a fairly rote detective thriller turns, in the second half, into a truly bleak paranoia thriller on euro state corruption and surveillance state. kept being ready to discount this as minor, and it kept surprising me. have watched most of season one mindhunter this week and graf much more unfussy but no less rigorous take on crime procedural honestly feels like breath of fresh air.
my friend 'a', takahisa zeze
the plot synopsis - slumming journalist turned factory worker thinks his new co-worker, who might have murdered a kid when he was young, might be connected to a brand new similar murder in the region - somehow led me to think this would be some kind of a thriller.
but instead it's one of zeze's odd prestige films, a novel adaptation that charts a vision of japan of grief-stricken drop outs, both young and old, somehow paying for social stigma of the past. zeze is an amazing moment for moment director - single scenes, like a factory accident that comes out of nowhere, or a character that hasn't allowed themselves a moment of happiness in years enjoying karaoke, or any dozen others, are truly great. not sure about the whole structure, which is very slow burn, using 3 or 4 other threads apart from the main plots that don't cohere until the very end (and one of these only intersects for vaguest thematic reason). on the other hand think film would be lesser for that big weird gambit...
edit - should say i watched the moguillansky/mariano llinas/santiago palavecino tres fabulas de villa ocampo thing and found it almost totally worthless. has nothing to say about the literature, the politics, or even the fetishism of the that circle, and has one trick (slow moving pans around the villa with some superimpositions) that it repeats over and over. hopefully the money from the institute helped finance historias extraordinarias and castro and so on.
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