F for Fake (1973)

As from an old picture album you emerge, still hearing in your ears a voice that accompanied you during your childhood, together with the figure and the face that, while nameless in your wake life, you could identify every time. And yet the film warned you years before about the problems of your own and of every signature, as well as it prepared you for any consideration of a career based on traits and traces. In it, through the beat of certain jazz, you rediscover now the end of the century, as well as the period that gave you and all the theories you love birth. A man with a coat and a hat, walking through the fog of Paris, sitting there where you sat and playing tricks, and sometimes even throwing a coup de dés at you.

4 stars.

The Saddest Music in the World (2003)

A contest to find the saddest music in the world, where every time one wins a match, one slides into a pool of beer—perhaps just to make the Americans and their prohibition go insane. Inside a historic-mythical world (a XXth century mythology) set in Winnipeg, where the blurring of the colors just exacerbates the vividness of experience, the music comes as cause and medium, and finally as the only thing that rests after the end of all shows. Nothing perhaps like the origins of cinema could allow such a blend of laugh and tears—happily married in their stereotype, making an even bigger cliché where one can dissolve more, and more, as the music keeps going. What music?

“I hear music when I touch your hand...”

4 stars

Kamikaze Girls (2004)

You squint your eyes and let every color become light. You think of a Bildungsroman with the Clockwork Orange crew, except that this time everything is overly sweet, and even the violence of the music is, syrup like, enjoyed as just another moment in the joyous struggle against the world. There is something immanently perverse here, but perhaps the perversion is here played on us with four hands, delivering us at the end to a pure game of wiggling and laughing—where everyone—as a good player or conspirator—is invited. It is really just about telling stories, of one girl, two girls, some mafia, some small town—and a playful display of images that are the story itself, just like pastel-colored words.

4 stars.

Colour Me Kubrick (2006)

Color or Colour, a slight little difference, where one can hear glamour, finesse, pure entertainment or just a parody of it all. But without thinking exactly what a parody is or could be, let us just say that the film gives us (or at least me) the strange feeling of watching what could have been a proper Kubrick film, or at least the intense impulse to go and re-watch them all. Parody perhaps as a repetition of the repetition itself that Kubrick's films are in our own personal soundtrack, playing as we daily are, as we become, or as we just stop for a second to listen, to sense how a long or a medium shot is developing smoothly from or towards are own faces. Hilariously cruel? Perhaps just an ego looking at itself, in a last shot, as the credits start rolling and the tune engraves itself again in our own personal sound track.

3 stars

Wait until Dark (1967)

The theatricality of it makes it worth it. With the peculiar uncanniness of certain films of the 60's-70's, it demands an easy belief into the danger behind blurry lighting, closed spaces, an impromptu piano or a violin jump. Perhaps what is most spooky is the chance of so much acting in a real environment or of so much reality in a theatre—and by reality I do not pretend to concern myself with any realism or Lacanian universe—here we have rather the “easy” reality of suspense: knowing perfectly what will happen and yet immersed in an hour and a half pause of sincerity. To my taste perhaps the best part of the film are the first sequences—the stuffing of the doll, the airport, immigration, and the abduction while leaving the building. And I will confess, Audrey Hepburn's blind woman gives a sweet & sour perverse enjoyment to it. Finally, a diving into space worth your time.

3 stars