So it turns out we’re far from done with the films of the French New Wave and this one was a specific recommendation from our cinephile friend. Though this isn’t as incomprehensible as Adieu au Langage, this is easily the craziest of the films we’ve seen yet by Jean-Luc Godard.
This marks the third film we’ve watched by director Lee Chang-dong though it’s of his earliest works. It’s a bit of a coincidence that the same Gwangju Uprising that was covered in A Taxi Driver we’ve seen only recently is also a key event here but it makes sense that such a pivotal moment in the history of modern South Korea appears frequently in the country’s creative works.
So this is the film adaptation of the famous novel made by the famous director Stanley Kubrick. I have neither read the novel nor watched any adaptation, but Lolita is very much part of the cultural background everyone is familiar with so there’s nothing very shocking or surprising here. While this is a solid film and the material itself is extraordinary, I found this to be a straightforward, uninspired adaptation that has few signs of Kubrick’s usual genius.
This was a recommendation from our cinephile friend and I only realized later that it was directed by Peter Greenaway whose wonderfully named The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is very famous and something I’ve always meant to watch. Though the title for this film is less impressive, it’s still a very odd work that is very hard to classify, skirting as it does between being a stage play that is captured on film and a film that is about a stage play being performed for an audience.
I’ve actually run into mentions of this New Zealand film more than once, on at least one occasion about how it is a realistic depiction of how a person’s personality can suddenly and shockingly shift under the influence of alcohol. This was director Lee Tamahori’s debut feature and he later went to make many well known commercial films in Hollywood but I don’t think that any of them has quite the impact of this one.
This is a very old Chinese film that I added to the list due to its classic status and its international reputation as one of the finest Chinese films ever made. However it predates the Communist victory by just a hair and as such it lacks the leftist sentiment that pervades the Chinese films of its era. This caused it to be sidelined by the Communists and its celebrated status today seems to be a relatively recent affair.
So I thought the whole time this was an Italian film but in fact it’s an English language film starring a whole roster of recognizable Hollywood stars. In fact this is a film directed by Italian director Paolo Sorrentino, whose La Grande Bellezza I loved a couple of years ago. This one is set almost entirely within the confines of a luxurious hotel in the Swiss Alps and it’s no less impressive a work.