The Devil's Avocado

I devour movies and music with a voracious appetite.  All styles, all forms, genres, old and new - I am a junky for this stuff.  Music and movies are my favorite things.  They have been for a long time, and I have done as much as I’ve been able to get to know these two glorious art forms.  I consider myself an expert in both. 

But I am still a baby.  There is still so much more to learn, to experience.  Particularly with music - which has been around since the dawn of man.  But movies - well, I’ve got a little more of a hold on that art form since it has been around for a considerably shorter time…about 100 years. 

I can see the arch, from foundation to present innovation, very clearly.  I am aware of almost all the landmarks and have been able to witness most of them firsthand - that is the beauty of film.  But the form is still so deep and rich, every time you get past another layer, a layer you think is the most significant, you discover another layer that is its equal, if only stranger and more personal.  I love discovering.

So, it has troubled me that I have largely ignored one of cinema’s most important and intoxicating and romantic of landmark eras - the French New Wave. 

I saw Breathless years ago, often considered the best (or first or most important) film of the movement, and did not care for it.  At all.  It left a bad taste in my mouth.  Whenever I tried going back, to almost ANY French Flick made after 1960 (I love the earlier stuff, particularly Renoir), that same icky taste returned to my taste buds.  Just…icky.  Right? I have always had a deep respect for the advances the French New Wave brought to us, but I have been less respectful to the movies themselves - almost kinda like special effects extravaganza crap-fests that have forwarded the look of films, but not so much the storytelling. 

Yikes! I hadn’t really had that analogy in mind when I started writing this, but there it is.  That said, I decided recently to shove several of them down my throat like the good medicine they are:

Weekend (’67)

Okay, this is exactly what I’m talking about.  Godard.  What a fucker.  He’s the one who put me off this whole movement from the very beginning.  This movie is a perfect example.  Some really interesting stuff every once in a while.  But mostly, he just delivers noise.  I know that I’m missing something.  I know that it’s me.  Maybe someday something will click and I’ll go “OHHHHH!!!” But for now, Godard seems like a little smart-ass jaggoff who hates movies and makes them only to poop all over them.

Last Year at Marienbad (’62)

Now, this movie is just as bizarre as Weekend.  Just as utterly inscrutable.  You think Mulholland Drive is enigmatic? Try this weirdie out.  But, holy shit, is it haunting.  Frustrating and slow and pretentious and slow and repetitive and slow - but absolutely completely totally mesmerizing.  I really really liked this one.  I’m looking forward to seeing it again to soak in some more of its mystery.

Cleo from 5 to 7 (’62)

This is another I had a problem with.  I always have this idealistic notion of the French New Wave that I want to see in their movies.  You ever see Bertolucci’s thrilling, sexy The Dreamers from 2003? That’s the type of giddy youthful atmosphere I want to see bleeding onto the celluloid of this unforgettable era.  Sometimes it’s there.  But mostly, I feel that these films are stuck in their conceited, self-conscious, bratty brains.  In this one: a young woman is waiting to hear the results of her biopsy, find out whether she has cancer, yada yada.  Really interesting premise.  Shallow results.  Yeah, I know it’s about a shallow woman.  But the movie itself feels shallower than she.  It’s only in the last 10-15 minutes, when she meets an intriguing stranger, that the movie allows any genuine interaction to take place. 

Jules and Jim (’62)

Francois Truffaut.  I like this guy.  Always have - ever since I saw him in Close Encounters.  He brought a new sense of urgency and playfulness to film that translates well to the present.  His storytelling hasn’t dated like much of his dusty colleagues’.  The story is driven by whimsy and momentary happiness.  It’s an exhilarating thing to see unravel.  It comments on and laughs at itself while still having fun.  In the meantime, there’s storytelling innovations galore.  Part of the importance of the French New Wave (I keep the “French” bit on there because there were many other international “New Waves”, including the current “Mexican” one) was that they were tearing apart the thing they loved, in order to put it together again.  Truffaut, to me, is one of the few FNW-ers to put it back together so lovingly…