Given the erratic state of foreign film imports, it’s hard to keep abreast of recent French cinema. But, starting Friday, two short movies playing for a week at Facets (1517 W. Fullerton Ave.) will showcase two young “unknowns”-directors Remi Bernard and Pascale Bailly-whose verve, intelligence and filmmaking flair make them stand out.
Bernard’s “The Taste of Iron” achieves greater unity in a smaller compass: Most of the film is set in a restaurant kitchen where a female cook, in the midst of veals and sauces, grills her male helper about a “stolen kiss” he says made him late for work. The blocking is ingenious, the acting deft, the psychological undertones inexorably teased.
Bailly’s “Things People Do” is more complex: In this modern “La Ronde,” three men and four women chase and switch, romantically. The movie has the swift rhythm of the younger Truffaut and is so cool it seems almost heartless. But Bailly’s skill is unmistakable.
– British filmmaking maverick Alan Clarke-subject of the major retrospective at the Film Center of the School of the Art Institute (Columbus Drive and Jackson Boulevard)-had a knack for portraying England’s juvenile delinquents and borstal boys. But he also was good at upper-class toffs and politicos. Does that tell us something?
Of the Clarke films screened this week, two-the long-censored 1977 “Scum” (6 p.m. Friday) and the hair-raising 1983 “Made in Britain” (4:30 p.m. Sunday)-are set in low society. The 1980 “Beloved Enemy” (7:30 p.m. Friday), a wry portrayal of economic perestroika, is in high. The 1988 “The Firm” (6 p.m. Sunday), about soccer fan hooliganism, rattles somewhere in between.
All show a country teetering on moral and financial collapse, held together with oddly stylized social systems along with bullying, brass and meanness. It’s a cruel portrait of cruel subcultures. But, as always, Clarke makes them real.
“Scum,” a scathing look at a British borstal (or reformatory), was written by Roy Minton for the BBC in 1977. The film was banned immediately and was not shown until 1990.
Boys’ prison pictures often sentimentalize, sensationalize or even eroticize their subject matter. “Scum” is as furious and direct as its title. It exposes the brutality of wardens and prisoners alike. Only one character gets sympathy, a defenseless “pigeon” who is harried, raped and terrorized. The ending is an explosion of rage-the boys’, but also Clarke’s-at a citizenry that allows this. Small wonder it was banned.
“Perfect Enemy,” by contrast, shows amorality among the rich: A group of smug corporate lords conspire to peddle laser technology to the USSR, as a condition of opening a “tyre” factory in Russia. Clarke tends to show people proceeding as if caught in mechanical traps, and it’s fascinating to see this story-the spying and venality, the bribery and intimidation of an MP-unwinding as if it were business as usual.
In 1983’s “Made in Britain,” Tim Roth, in his starring debut, pulverizes the show. As neo-Nazi skinhead Trevor, Roth incarnates the evil side of punk. There’s no rhyme nor reason to Trevor’s brutalism.
– Anyone curious about how Samuel Beckett, Irish master of bleak modern parables, envisioned his theater works should be fascinated by the series “Beckett Directs Beckett” at Facets Video Theater. The series offers four of his plays, staged by Beckett himself with actors from the San Quentin Drama Workshop.
This week’s entry, his dark comic classic about paralyzed clown-tramps, “Waiting for Godot,” screens at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 6 p.m. Sunday.
– Midway through “Nothing Sacred” (1937), this week’s Carole Lombard movie at the Film Center (6 p.m. Tuesday), drunken doctor Charlie Winninger says to editor Walter Connolly: “I’ll tell you what I think of newspapermen. The hand of God, reaching down into the mire, couldn’t elevate one of them to the depths of degradation.”
The man who wrote that speech, and the rest of this great, black-hearted comedy (with uncredited help from Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman and others) was Ben Hecht, one of the best newspeople, and almost certainly the best Hollywood screenwriter, America ever produced.
The story-about an unscrupulous New York reporter (Fredric March) who talks a small town victim of radium poisoning (Lombard) into faking fatal illness to boost his paper’s circulation-is amazingly cynical and howlingly funny. The main thing wrong with “Nothing Sacred”-other than general ’30s “incorrectness”-may be that Howard Hawks didn’t direct it, instead of the slightly less suave Wild Bill Wellman.
