John Huston – “The Dead” (1987)
Faithfully adapted from James Joyce’s “Dubliners” short story “The Dead,” John Huston’s final film was directed from a wheelchair with oxygen tubes protruding out of his nose, according to critic Pauline Kael. She loved the movie, and while it divides Playlist staff a bit, most of us are with Kael and the consensus in considering it one of the filmmaker’s best across a career that stretched over forty years. Joyce is generally considered all but unadaptable, and Huston and his son Tony (who wrote the screenplay: this was a family affair in general, with daughter Anjelica taking a lead role too) certainly didn’t have an easy task, given the interiority of the source story, which is set at an Epiphany party in 1904 Dublin, where academic Gabriel Conroy (Donal McCann) discovers that his wife (Anjelica Huston) still mourns a dead ex-lover. Intimate to the point that some find it borderline stagy, and defying almost all screenwriting maxims in its fidelity to Joyce, it’s not exactly high drama. But it’s a testament to Huston’s titanic status that he was able to experiment this late in his career, and as the camera glides through the party, picking up details and nuances, it builds towards the quietly devastating conclusion, as Huston’s Gretta recalls her lost love. What’s perhaps even more remarkable, given the caliber of performances across the board, and the general feel for Irish culture, is that Huston, too ill to travel, shot the whole thing in a warehouse in California. It’s hardly a crowd pleaser, but the whole thing ultimately gives the suggestion that Huston has just thrown his old wake, and you mourn for him (the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 1987, less than a week after Huston passed away). [B]
Francois Truffaut – “Confidentially Yours” (1983)
French New Wave pioneer Francois Truffaut‘s final film is undeniably something of a minor work, but in retrospect feels terminally underrated (including by the director himself, who dismissed it), and perhaps his mostly fully-achieved and enjoyable experiment in crime noir. Based on “The Long Saturday Night” by Charles Williams (who also wrote the book that “Dead Calm” was based on), it’s a sly upending of the mystery-thriller, which sees Barbara (Fanny Ardant), the secretary of estate-agent Julien (Jean-Louis Trintignant), step in to clear her boss’s name when he’s accused of killing his wife’s lover. Nodding more to something like “The Thin Man” and even screwball comedy (Truffaut asked Ardant to perform her lines at top speed), it’s also a return to the Hitchcock influence that had taken a back seat among the filmmaker’s more recent pictures. But whereas something like “The Bride Wore Black” sometimes had the ring of imitation rather than homage, here, “Confidentially Yours” feels like its own beast, and 100% a Truffaut picture. The black-and-white photography gives it all the more authenticity, too—it sometimes seems like it could be a lost gem from an earlier era that’s somehow only just been unearthed. It’s perhaps all the more touching as the film is clearly a deeply felt love letter to Ardant. Truffaut had relationships with many of his leading ladies, but none are more glowingly paid tribute to than Ardant (who was in a relationship with the director from the early 1980s until his death). And as such, while it’s tempting to wish that Truffaut had ended his career on more of a note of summing-up, it’d be hard to deny him this one, even if it wasn’t so much damn fun. [B+]
Robert Bresson – “L’argent” (1983)
Though he lived on to the grand old age of 98, passing away in 1999, “L’argent” marked Robert Bresson‘s final film, and it’s one of his most disheartening and darkest. But to simply describe it as cynical or a moral censure is to miss the filmmaker’s coolly objective distance (and its caustic sense of irony). Earning its maker the Best Director award at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival, “L’argent” is loosely inspired by “The Forged Coupon,” a Tolstoy short, and illustrates how greed sets off a chain of events that affects the lives of dozens. A counterfeit 500 franc note is used by a pair of callow and well-to-do middle school students at a photography and camera store, but instead of tracking down their parents, the unscrupulous photo manager vows to pass off the note himself. Yvon, an honest, unsuspecting gas man (Christian Patey) pays the price when he comes in contact with the bill, is duped, and then is later arrested for trying to buy dinner at a restaurant with this phony note. While he is spared jail time at the trial, the desperation of losing his job and means of supporting his family eventually leads this victim to become the getaway driver in a friend’s attempted (and foiled) bank robbery. During his three-year prison sentence, Yvon learns that his young daughter has died and his wife is now leaving him. And it only gets bleaker and more heartbreaking once Yvon is released from prison. While its mordant take on class, social injustice, and arguably the evils of money can be viewed through a Marxist lens, as Vincent Canby wrote in 1983, its outlook is actually “far too poetic—too interested in the mysteries of the spirit.” Ultimately, “L’argent” is one of Bresson’s late-career astringent, cruel jokes; deeply depressing and haunting, it’s an unsentimental and dissociated look at amorality, and how its effects trickle downward. [A-]
David Lean – “A Passage To India” (1984)
David Lean‘s last decade or so were frustrating ones: he was replaced as the director of the film that became “The Bounty” (initially envisioned as a two-parter), and couldn’t get his mooted final project, an adaptation of Joseph Conrad‘s ‘Nostromo,” over the line before he passed away in April 1991. As a result, his final project was “A Passage To India,” a grand-scale version of E.M. Forster‘s book, and while it was nominated for eleven Oscars and initially hailed by many as one of the epic-specialist’s most impressive achievements (Ebert called it “one of the greatest screen adaptations I have ever seen”), its reputation has faded somewhat since. And perhaps rightly so: it’s a decent film, but not one that stands behind Lean’s top tier of masterpieces. Set in the 1920s, as the fractures in the British empire’s hold on India are starting to appear, it centers on young British woman Adela (Judy Davis), widower Dr. Aziz (Victor Banerjee) and local superintendent Richard Fielding (James Fox), whose initial friendship collapses after Aziz is accused of attempting to sexually assault Adela. As you’d imagine with the director, it’s a stunning-looking piece of work, filming the landscapes of the nation in a way that puts the Diet Lean of “Gandhi” a few years earlier to shame, but it sometimes feels like a round peg in a small hole: it’s really quite an intimate story, and Lean’s filmmaking risks overwhelming it at times. In fact, he might have been the wrong director for the material on a number of levels: the book’s a fairly fierce attack on British colonialism, but Lean’s more rose-tinted in the way he looks back (not aided by Alec Guinness appearing in brownface as an Indian character), which leaves a sour taste. There’s still much to love here, not least the central performance from Judy Davis, but it’s a shame that Lean went out on what’s probably one of his weaker efforts. [C+]