Thursday Movie Picks - Double Features

Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join in the fun by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and writing a bit about them!

Last summer, Film Forum in NYC ran a series called "Return of the Double Feature!" (exclamation point included, as in Moulin Rouge!) that I had a LOT of fun attending. What was great was that it wasn't always immediately clear why two movies were paired together until you really thought about it, or even until you sat down and watched them. It made me think about programming a series like that and how much fun it would be.

Well thankfully, our lovely wandering host has given us that opportunity this week, as the theme for Thursday Movie Picks is DOUBLE FEATURES!

Naturally, I came up with far more ideas than I have time to write up, but here are three of my favorites.

GHOSTLY CHILDREN DOUBLE FEATURE!

The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961)/The Others (Alejandro Amenábar, 2001) Creepy old English manor houses haunted by ghostly children.... except the children aren't the ghosts! The Others is as close to a spiritual sequel to The Innocents as we're ever likely to get. Both films have a chilly formalism that doesn't make them any less scary or give them any less emotional impact, and their twists and turns will keep you guessing about what's REALLY going on all the way through in the best possible way. Plus, each possesses one of the greatest performances from a great actress: Deborah Kerr is utter perfection in The Innocents, while The Others gives Nicole Kidman a role that encapsulates all the best things about her screen persona. Both are perfection.

SEXUAL MORES DOUBLE FEATURE!

Belle de Jour (Luis Buñuel, 1967)/Fifty Shades of Grey (Sam Taylor-Johonson, 2015) Basically, watch Bunuel's semi-surrealist masterpiece of sexual desire, and then watch Taylor-Johnson's slightly-better-than-expected erotic romance/coming-of-age drama and marvel at how far we haven't come in depicting sex on screen. In the former, Catherine Deneuve's frigid, bored housewife becomes a prostitute in a high-class brothel during her days, acting out her "depraved" sexual fantasies while leading a supposedly perfect life with her doctor husband. In the latter, Dakota Johnson's mousy college student becomes entranced by the local handsome billionaire, only to be repulsed by/attracted to his kinky sexual proclivities. Both depict women taking ownership of their bodies and sexual desires in ways women are rarely allowed to do in film, but for all the hype, Fifty Shades is barely more explicit and FAR less provocative than a film released fifty years ago with a major star.

TEENAGE 80S BANDS DOUBLE FEATURE!

We Are The Best (Lukas Moodyson, 2014)/Sing Street (John Carney, 2016) Two of the most adorable movies you will ever see, these films really get what it feels like to be a teenager and needing to express yourself in ways that no one else understands - and how music can unlock something special inside of you. Even if it's terrible music. Wonderful performances from debuting leads, great songs, and fantastic costumes/makeup fill both of these films, which couldn't be more different, but are also wonderfully similar. They will both leave you walking on clouds of joy by the end.

BONUS PICK

Grindhouse (Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino, 2007) This pre-packaged double feature from two hotshot directors is quite the tribute to the questionable-quality cheapie B-movies from the 70s, and has all the hallmarks of a late night double feature picture show: explosions, hookers, flat acting, fast cars, and FANTASTIC fake trailers in between the two halves. Rodriguez's zombie flick Planet Terror is more fun, but Tarantino's car chase/serial killer shot Death Proof has one of the greatest car chases ever filmed. All the actors are clearly having a blast, and most of them have never, ever been better.

Bind Spot #3: Diary of a Chambermaid

Written as part of the series hosted by Ryan at The Matinee.

While watching Luis Buñuel's Diary of a Chambermaid this weekend, I kept asking different "Why..." questions. Namely, why did I choose this particular film for this project?

I mean, I know why in theory: Of the Buñuel films I own, this was the earliest, and it seemed like a good warm-up for both the current version with Lea Seydoux in the title role (as perfect casting for Benoît Jacquot as Jeanne Moreau was for Buñuel) and Buñuel's later psychosexual masterpiece, Belle de Jour with Catherine Deneuve. Unfortunately, I don't really think it ended up being either of those things, nor was it overall a good representation of Buñuel as a filmmaker.

Things start off well enough, with shots of scenery passing outside of a train window just out of focus enough for us to be not entirely sure what we're looking at. But it eventually becomes clear, and we see Jeanne Moreau as Célestine, a woman from Paris come to the country to serve as chambermaid to a bourgeois family. The family certainly has its quirks: Madame seems to care far more about the things in the house than the people in it, including her own husband who, incidentally, apparently comes on to everything with boobs and legs. And of course, the patriarch, to whom we are introduced as he shoots a butterfly off a flower, only to proclaim instantly afterwards that he has both never shot a gun before and actually quite likes butterflies. Serving him is one of Célestine's primary duties, and in addition to having her serve him herbal tea, he wants her to wear and walk around in some old boots.

That's pretty much the extent of anything sexually perverse in the film. Yes, Monsieur makes some advances to Célestine, which she rebuffs - only after flirting with him extensively (after which he takes the other, "ugly" maid out into the barn to do things with). And yes, there is some drama around a young girl who for some unexplained reason hangs around the house and whose body is found at around the film's midway point, having been raped and murdered. It is strongly implied, although never spoken outright, that the house's farmer/handyman Joseph, who is quite politically active in France's nascent fascist movement, committed this crime.

And that right there is my biggest problem with this film. In adapting the novel by Octave Mirbeau, Buñuel and screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière (this is the first of several collaborations between the two, another reason why I chose this film) chose to update the novel's turn-of-the-century setting to the 1930s, a time of some political unrest in France. Apparently. I don't really know French history THAT well. But whatever the history was, politics makes many appearances throughout the film, and strangely, the film ends with Joseph, a proprietor of a café, just like the one he had talked about starting with Célestine (she became intimate with him in order to confirm her suspicion that he killed the little girl). He cheers on protestors saying (among other things) "Vive Chiappe!" Jean Chiappe was a popular police prefect who, because of his very right-leaning politics, had successive governments try in vain to remove him from his post. In February 1934, they finally succeeded, and the far-right leagues launched a demonstration in protest, which - this being France - rapidly deteriorated into a full-on riot against the government. Buñuel had a personal vendetta against Chiappe because he banned L'Age d'Or when he was police prefect in Paris.

Anyway, history lesson aside, the decision to cede the film's final scene to Joseph is odd, since Célestine is very obviously our main character. In the end, she marries the blowhard ex-Army officer neighbor of her former employers, hires the "ugly" maid she used to work with to work for her, and gives the impression of becoming everything her employers were. Not worse, but certainly no better. The film could have ended there just fine. But it continues on to the protest scene with Joseph, and I'm suddenly lost. I'm sure this ending probably had more meaning to the French audiences of 1964, but it went way over my head. Yes, seeing these hordes of people marching in the streets is chilling, but it does not seem of a piece with the story of the rest of the film. There's been political talk in the film, so it doesn't come completely out of left field, but it hasn't been the main storyline, and this one scene hijacks the narrative in such a way that I had to question the entire film I just watched... and not in a good way.

If there's a reason to see Diary of a Chambermaid, it's Jeanne Moreau. She's perfect as Célestine, impenetrable yet somehow completely open. We are constantly aware of what she's thinking, even if what she feels about it remains a tantalizing mystery. She single-handedly gives the film whatever sexiness it has, and that gorgeous face makes the last scene perfectly ambiguous - is Célestine happy to get what she has always wanted and becoming just like her employers whom she hated, or is she finding that this life that once seemed so great really isn't fulfilling at all? It's great, great work.

Buñuel is certainly on good form for most of the film, as well. Diary of a Chambermaid is certainly a great-looking film, and while it largely lacks the surrealist imagery that is a hallmark of the director's work, it does contain its fair share of striking images - the butterfly getting shot off the flower; the dead girl's bare leg, snails slowly crawling up it; and one particular shot of Monsieur and Madame that looks for all the world like a split-screen, emphasizing just how separate their lives are.

But for me, this Diary of a Chambermaid doesn't nearly live up to its potential. The material seems like a good fit for Buñuel, but he doesn't do enough with it: It's not sexy enough, not perverse enough, not funny enough, not subversive enough, and in the end, not focused enough. For all that happens, it doesn't feel like a story with an arc, just a series of events with an arbitrary endpoint that practically comes out of nowhere. Could that be making a larger point about life? Perhaps. But I don't think so. Not in this case. In this case, it looks like Buñuel's personal stuff got in the way of making this as good as it could have been.

Diary of a Chambermaid (Le Journal d'une Femme de Chambre)
Year: 1964
Directed by: Luis Buñuel
Screenplay by: Luis Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière
Starring: Jeanne Moreau, Michel Piccoli, Georges Geret, Françoise Lugagne, Jean Ozenne, Daniel Invernel, Muni
Rating: **1/2