Armée des Ombres by Jean-Pierre Melville

Chatte à Deux Têtes by Jacques Nolot

Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran by François Dupeyron

Les Quatre cents coups by François Truffaut

Les Triplettes de Belleville by Sylvain Chomet

Les chansons d’amour by Christophe Honoré

Une affaire de femmes by Claude Chabrol

De battre mon coeur s’est arrêté by Jacques Audiard

Alphaville by Jean-Luc Godard

Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux by Jean-Luc Godard

Our day started with Modern Love is Automatic [IMDB][MFF], directed by Zach Clark, starring Melodie Sisk (as Lorraine) and Maggie Ross (as Adrian).

Modern Love is Automatic was a dark and dry comedy-drama about nurse Lorraine who, bored with with her environment and the people in her life, detached herself emotionally and socially from everything. Controlling every detail in her life it doesn’t seem surprising when she finds interest in a dominatrix magazine. When she finds her boyfriend cheating she decides to look for a new roommate and becomes a dominatrix at night. She finds aspiring fashion model Adrian, whose emotionality and bubbliness very much is Lorraine’s total opposite. But just as opposites attract, they very slowly develop a friendship in the background of their individual lives and Adrian’s boyfriend Mitch who is uncontrollably obsessed with Lorraine.

Zach Clark, Maggie Ross, Melodie Sisk, Daryl Pittman

This movie was easily one of my favorites this year. I not only loved the great performances, cool sets, colors and costumes, but also the pace and quiet as well as Melodie Sisk’s facial expressions that said more than could ever be said with words. Modern Love feels like a nice companion to my other favorites from the last two festival years when I saw Ronald Bronstein’s Frownland and Mary Bronstein’s Yeast. In these movies I was able to identify with the characters and their paralyzed social lives and relationships to an unusual extent. What can I say, I loved everything about Modern Love is Automatic. Even the bursts of doom metal worked really well in there. Definitely a movie I would like to see again sometime, and one I can highly recommend.

David Redmon

Our second screening this Friday was Invisible Girlfriend [IMDB][MFF], directed by David Redmon and Ashley Sabin, with and about Charles Fihoil, a bipolar paranoid schizophrenic who lives in Monroe, Louisiana with his parents and children. He is in love with his invisible girlfriend, the spirit of Joan of Arc, and decides that DeeDee, his pen pal and New Orleans bartender, might be Joan of Arc in the flesh. The filmmaker follows him on a 400-mile bicycle journey to find DeeDee.

This was a wonderful documentary about a man who may be a bit crazy, but also very intelligent, insightful and caring. During his journey through rural Louisiana, which lasted about 12 days, he met several generous, kind and very down-to-earth people who gave him a ride or shared food and stories with him. I found it interesting how this journey was accompanied by a number of moments of death and decay that foreshadowed what he would find at his destination. Beautiful, sometimes funny, but also very sad, this film managed to create a non-judgmental portrait of Charles Fihoil and the people he met on his way. I really liked this film. I was also very impressed by some of the music choices.

Another documentary we saw this Friday was Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, directed by Jessica Oreck. This film portrayed a part of Japanese culture I was completely unfamiliar with before: Japan’s love and fascination with insects that is inherent in the whole society and all generations from young to old age. Insects are collected like trading cards or comic books, are part of quite a significantly sized industry of collectors and breeders. Insects appear in shape of dolls, toys, video games, candy, but also inspire art and literature, dating back to the beginning of Japan’s history.

Jessica Oreck and Sean Williams

Beetle Queen was partially in English, partially Japanese with English subtitles and filled with a great amount of insight, history and poetry about an ancient and still mysterious culture that may mostly be known to the Western world for their car and electronic brands, fashion and pop culture, their tv-shows or cuisine. I can highly recommended it to anyone who is interested in learning more about Japan from a slightly different angle. The cinematography comes from Sean Williams who also shot Frownland and Yeast I mentioned above. I would love to see it again and follow the history and poetry in more depth than I was able to comprehend upon my first viewing.

I have to admit: A few days ago, if someone had told me to watch a romantic musical, I probably would have would have smiled and dismissed it without giving it a chance. The musical genre was not one I was particularly interested in before. The few musicals I have ever seen were entertaining to a degree, but they didn’t manage to grab me. Why? I’m not sure… perhaps it’s something I wasn’t properly introduced to growing up in Germany. About every movie made in Germany of the 50s and 60s was incredibly silly and featured a lot of bad German Schlager music. Television was practically non-existent, and eventually the popularity died off and no musical films were produced anymore for a very long time. I can’t really think of any musical film produced in Germany since the days of the economic boom.

In the mid to late 80s (stage) musicals became very popular with Cats. Many others including Starlight Express, Phantom of the Opera followed later, and they are still popular in Germany, but as far as I know, there haven’t been any movies to speak of. Every time I saw a movie with dancing and singing people they appeared very foreign to me. Something I couldn’t connect to.

Perhaps the setting and background were too artificial…perhaps the music was too methodical or constructed…perhaps I was thrown out of the story every time one of the actors starts to sing instead of keeping his character. How believable is the evil villain, mad professor or action hero who suddenly begins to dance and sing?

John Waters and Jed Dietz

Being a romantic musical I never would have volunteered to pick Love Songs [IMDB][MFF] if it hadn’t been the John Waters pick this year. The annual “John Waters Pick” has been one of our traditions since we started attending the film festival. His movie selections did never disappoint in the past few years. Most of his selections, including Story of Women, Dog Days or Head-On offered an extraordinarily realistic view on love, people and the complexity of their emotional, social, sexual, human interactions…reflecting what life is really like, challenging what most movies try to suggest as reality.

Love Songs was directed by Christophe Honoré and stars Chiara Mastroianni, Louis Garrel, Ludivine Sagnier and Clotilde Hesme. It’s a romantic musical, yes…but one I actually enjoyed very much! It felt very current and natural, the songs and music were beautiful and were very elegantly woven into the story. So fluent, it almost felt as if these moments could have happened in real life… although I have never seen someone walking down the street singing, have I?

Everybody looked great, very natural and likable, the story was beautiful, so was the atmosphere and mood. I still find myself surprised how much I enjoyed this movie. Another contemporary musical film I saw a while ago (Sweeney Todd) left me with the same impression I had of other musicals before, not so Love Songs. Perhaps it worked so well because it was in French and playing in Paris? I don’t know, but I really enjoyed its pace and rhythm. I think I might have to correct some of my views I used to have about musicals. Perhaps there is more out there I would enjoy if I gave it a try.

After Love Songs we had our first break of the day and we used the opportunity to celebrate our 5th filmfest membership anniversary with a pitcher of sangria. I should have eaten something first, because the wine quickly made me feel a little fuzzy-headed.

Of course this didn’t help when we entered our fifth and last screening of the day: Seventh Moon [IMDB][MFF] directed by Eduardo Sánchez, starring Amy Smart, Dennis Chan and Tim Chiou. The story takes place in China where Melissa and Yul enjoy their honeymoon. Their visit coincides with the sacred Seventh Moon festival, celebrating the full moon of the seventh lunar month, which, according to a Chinese myth, is a time when the dead are free to walk the earth. The couple, drunk after celebrating, start a late night cab-drive to Yul’s grandmother’s house in the countryside. This trip will of course end somewhere lost in the middle of nowhere where the horror is about to take place.

Directed by Eduardo Sánchez who with Daniel Myrick also wrote and directed the Blair Witch Project, Seventh Moon felt a lot like Blair Witch Project including its shaky camera work. Even without sangria I got motion sick when I watched the Blair Witch on the big screen. The same happened Friday night during the Seventh Moon. I survived about three quarter of the movie, but I had to close my eyes because I felt increasingly dizzy. A few minutes before the movie was over I had to leave the theater to breathe some fresh air and get stable ground under my feet which made me feel better. Unfortunately I missed the ending of the movie and the Q and A afterward, but my stomach wasn’t ready for it. Next time I should probably take some pills for motion sickness before I watch another shaky movie.

The following list is in order from my top pick down for Friday, May 8:

1. Modern Love is Automatic
2. Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo
3. Invisible Girlfriend
4. Love Songs
5. Seventh Moon

PS: Sorry about the bad quality of these photos. My camera didn’t take the low-light too well. I hope I got all the names right. Please correct me if I made a mistake.

This year he picked the French film Story of Women about the last woman to be executed for performing abortions in the nazi-occupied France. Isabelle Huppert was remarkable in her incredibly complex role as Marie. As someone wrote in a review: “[...] She is clear-headed and sly as a business woman, warm and ordinary as a mother, cold and brutal as a wife, childish and careless as an adulteress, resourceful and fearless as an abortionist [...]” the scope of her character was extraordinary.

I thought this story sounded so familiar to me and I was sure I have watched this film before, perhaps a dubbed version back in Germany? But on the other hand, how could I have forgotten about such an impressive film? No, I haven’t seen Story of Women released in 1988 before. Actually, it was Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake released in 2004. It plays in England of the 50s and not France, but very much follows the similar story of a woman who performs abortions and gets into trouble after one procedure ended with complications. Vera Drake was good, Story of Women by far superior.

Story of Women is a careful, complex story and character study with a lot of attention to realism and detail. It definitely is an excellent work of French cinema. [imdb]

We live in a world where the debate around abortion is locked in simple, dogmatic positions that too often squeeze all human reality out of the equation. But this provocative film from one of France’s most talented filmmakers refuses to let us settle in so comfortably.

Film legend Claude Chabrol tells the story of women who lived under France’s Nazi-collaborating Vichy government and became involved in abortion for a variety of reasons. The lead character, Marie Latour, based on a real woman and played by the great actress Isabelle Huppert, becomes an abortionist not out of conviction, but because she sees a need and fills it. Prosecuted by a government with a severely compromised moral framework, she was one of the last women in France to be executed.

Chabrol doesn’t let the viewer take sides easily. Janet Maslin’s New York Times review praised the film, saying it “resolutely avoids passing judgment,” and Chabrol himself dedicates the film to “all its interpreters,” asking us to confront moral complexities we’d rather avoid. It’s a unique film from this great director, who distinguished himself as one of the pioneers of the French New Wave, and whose extensive body of work (with seventy films to his name and counting) is comprised primarily of subtle psychological thrillers.

Highly praised by critics and the winner of numerous awards, yet infrequently shown on the big screen in the U.S., a rare 35mm print of Story of Women has been flown in by diplomatic pouch. (Jed Dietz) (from the filmfest-guide)