This morning's film was Coco Avant Chanel, which was beautifully made and enjoyable - and my goodness Audrey Tautou looks so much like Chanel! - but I still found it a bit disappointing. Of course the film's title is very clear about the fact that it is not about how she built up her haute couture empire, yet at the same time it tried to be a little bit about that, and I found that was actually what I wanted to know more about - not about her relationships with the men who helped her get to a position of being able to set up her business, since at the very least it seemed - from the film - that she didn't want to depend on men. So I found that rather unresolved and unsatisfying.
Last Sunday we sojourned in the colourful fantasy world of Pedro Almodóvar, watching Abrazos Rotos (Broken Embraces) - as K put it, basically the same film he always makes, about lost or unrequited love and obsessions, but my god he's good at it! So that was the usual delight - and so brightly coloured and patterned that your eyes feel like they have something wrong with them when you come out of the cinema, especially since it was daylight! But it very much made me want to jump on the first plane to Madrid...
And the week before, it was Das Weisse Band (The White Ribbon), the Michael Haneke film which was strangely exactly like The Castle, which we went to see at the BFI a few months ago - his film of an unfinished literary fragment of Proust, which just stops abruptly at the place Proust's fragment stops, so in your mind the characters are forever locked in their Proustian world of cyclical absurdities... The White Ribbon is probably the film that I rated the most out of these three, though it was sinister and disturbing, more so for the way it begins with a tranquil picture of a German village before the First World War and through accidents, murders and heightened suspicion among an enclosed community gradually rolls back all the ways in which adults abuse children... Haneke has apparently called it a film about the root cause of all terrorist acts.
The Ritzy's favourite for the Bafta was Let The Right One In, the beautiful Swedish vampire film which we also loved, but in the end the winner was Un Prophète, deservedly so I think as that really was in another league from the other nominations. It missed out on an Oscar - unsurprisingly I suppose, as those nominations seem to be more about securing television ratings for the awards ceremony than rewarding good film making... (though I am glad Avatar didn't win Best Picture). The foreign language award went to an Argentinian film I have never heard of (El Secreto de Sus Ojos) - but I hope it's released in the UK soon.
The whole idea of a foreign language category is so ridiculous anyway. These are just excellent films - better usually than most of the English-language films - and shouldn't be judged according to a different standard. Or rather, why should the English-language films be favoured, when often they seem to be scraping the barrel to get a list together, especially now they've made it longer.
It's like 'world music'. We like to put into boxes and ghettoes anything we don't (sometimes literally) understand.
Anyway - I've been enjoying Sunday morning cinema. Not sure what I'll do without it next weekend...
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We also went to see Banksy's film this week, Exit Through the Gift Shop. K and Cornelius both loved it - K was in stitches most of the time - but I have to admit, I was utterly bemused for most of it... It purported to be a documentary about a documentarist making a film about street art, but it was and it wasn't that. Like Banksy's own street art - or his recent 'interventions' at Bristol Museum (which I really wish I had had the chance to see) - it looks like one thing from a distance, and then you realise it is something else entirely. Thing is, I am still not sure I've worked it out...
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