Misery

Note : this review is my contribution to The Lauren Bacall blogathon hosted by In the Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood.

Misery (Rob Reiner, 1990)

Few days after being rescued and sheltered from a car crash caused by a blizzard by a nurse who claims to be his number one fan, a well-known author begins suspecting the mental health of his savior.

Paul Sheldon (James Caan) is a widely known best-selling author who just finished his more recent novel in a remote cabin in the Colorado. Being very superstitious he always has the same routine when he finishes a write-up and he takes his Mustang on the road just before a huge snowstorm. Obviously, he leaves the road and is badly hurt but someone saw him and saves him from a certain death. It is nurse Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates) who is also her number one fan. Slowly we understand that she keeps him from the rest of the world and he is hers. She forces him to destroy his latest novel and asks him to write a new Misery novel. Slowly recovering from his accident, Sheldon had both legs broken at several places and an arm in bad shape too. He is reduced to a wheel chair for a moment. Annie also locks his room and quickly becomes aggressive and dangerous. Paul knows he’ll have to escape if he wants to survive.

Rafales

Rafales (André Melançon, 1990)

On Christmas eve a journalist (Denis Bouchard) witnesses a theft in a mall and later tracks one of the thieves (Marcel Leboeuf) and ends up being taken as his hostage at the radio station he works for.

Populated with the constant sound of the wind blowing during a snow storm on December 24th in Montréal, Rafales french for gusts is at first a powerful thriller that easily transcends borders of the french speaking Province of Québec.

With Marcel Leboeuf as Gérard Crépeau a garage employee involved in a theft that was orchestrated by his brother Normand (Guy Thauvette) and Pouliot (Claude Blanchard) the boss of the garage might feel like a standard robbery gone bad until Gérard shoots the mall’s Santa Claus and flies away with the money and meet Louis-Philippe Trépanier (Denis Bouchard). Normand is arrested and Pouliot does an act of treason.

Prior to the robbery, Trépanier sees Gérard and Normand argue about the crime they are about to commit, he is in a toy store and picks up toys for his kids. He sees Gérard’s gun and starts to follow him. There’s a strange fascination in the way that Trépanier watches Gérard, who is the most fragile character in the movie. Trépanier is an opportunist and sees a scoop in the tracking of the thief. While he has the chance to alert policemen he doesn’t do so at the first place.

In fact, with the conclusion of the film we understand that he was using Gérard for his own purpose and his career. In a way, it was Gérard who was the hostage in the radio station broadcasting live the negociation with the police. Rémy Girard, aka the Québec actor that is cast in every Québec film ever made, is the manager of the station and saw the potential in Trépanier’s actions taking advantage even in accepting to pass commercials during the aforementioned live broadcast.

One of the most human moments is when Gérard lifts an aging Russian woman (Kim Yaroshevskaya) and talks about her past and then moments of his childhood. It is one of those moments that can be a home run or a total pathetic pathos moment. In this case it is perfect and its purpose is also well used.

Dedicated to the late John Cassavetes who had just passed out months before the opening of Rafales, director André Melançon made a strong film with a mise en scène that demonstrates his great mastery at storytelling keeping lots of silences especially with nearly 20 minutes in the opening and almost no dialogues outside of the radio station.

Having watched more than 2000 films in my life and written about at least 500 of them it is now less often that I feel left being impressed or ecstatic. With Rafales, it is the case where I think I sat in front of something that was quite unique. This is a very good film and one of my favorite films from my part of the world; the Province of Québec.

Home Alone

Home Alone (Chris Columbus, 1990)

Kevin McCallister (Macauley Culkin) is an eight-year-old boy that was left alone in his house when his family flies to Paris for their Christmas vacation. In the meantime, the wet bandits, Harry (Joe Pesci) and Marv (Daniel Stern), have planned to rob Kevin’s house during the night before Christmas. But they don’t know that he is an ingenious little brat that will be a pain in their ass.

Close-Up

Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990)

The film tells the story of the real-life trial of a man (Hossain Sabzian) who impersonated film-maker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, conning a family into believing they would star in his new film. It features the people involved, acting as themselves. A film about human identity, it helped to increase recognition of Abbas Kiarostami in the West.

Nouvelle Vague

Nouvelle Vague (Jean-Luc Godard, 1990)

Of Jean-Luc Godard’s post masterpiece era, his films made after 1968 the year he discovered Maoism and let the traditional narratives of Cinema away to make a more instinctive form of films that are quite unique and complex but also not accessible for a wider public, Nouvelle Vague stands as a beautiful strange film that flirts with Science-Fiction, in a plot line manner, and the Hitchcock thriller. A film starring no other than Alain Delon that plays twin brothers who eventually are complete opposites of each other and that create a mystery on the meaning of it all.

Alice (1990)

Alice (Woody Allen, 1990)

Blending the telling of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Tale, and Federico Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits, Woody Allen’s Alice starring Mia Farrow is often overlooked compared to his Crimes and Misdemeanors of 1989 and Husbands and Wives of 1992. Speaking of blends, Alice is also a blend of genres, navigating between comedy, fantastic, and drama, the character of Alice Tate (Mia Farrow) is the wife of a wealthy business man (William Hurt) but she isn’t really in love anymore.

Cry-Baby

Cry-Baby (John Waters, 1990)

Earlier this year I made a promess to myself and my readers that I would tackle a list of directors that I’ve never seen a movie they directed. This list includes many great and recognized names : from Maurice Pialat to Ermano Olmi and from Russ Meyer to Glauber Rocha. One of the names on this list that intrigued me the most was John Waters. From his thrash counter culture films of the 1970’s and 1980’s starring the transsexual Divine to his more mainstream pieces like Hairspray and Cry-Baby. At first, I knew it was a Grease parody and a tribute to the teenage exploitation films of the 1950’s. It is also a pastiche of Elvis Prestley movies. After reading these lines one could easily put the label kitsch here. Well, one cannot be more right. It is a film that is not taken itself too seriously while involving a great laugh and a good fun. So it is far from being high-brow and not that far to low-brow. However, it is not as trashy as his Pink Flamingos where scenes of hardcore sex and feces eating are presented.

Ju Dou

Ju Dou (Zhang Yimou and Yan Fengliang, 1990)

Shot in a bright Technicolor in 1990. You read right, it was shot in this old process by Zhang Yimou and Yan Fengliang. It is the tragic story of the old man (Li Wei) who owns a cloth dyer place and has bought himself a wife called Ju Dou (Gong Li), well it’s his third, to get a pair of hands to work with him, a heir, and a sexual slave. His nephew (Li Baotian) is a good hearted forty years old man who works for him. It is pretty obvious that this story won’t end happily and that the title character and the nephew will get together in the back of the cruel uncle.