Movie Review: Da 5 Bloods

Da 5 Bloods (2020) **** ½ / *****
Directed by: Spike Lee.
Written by: Danny Bilson & Paul De Meo and Kevin Willmott & Spike Lee.
Starring: Delroy Lindo (Paul), Jonathan Majors (David), Clarke Peters (Otis), Norm Lewis (Eddie), Isiah Whitlock Jr. (Melvin), Mélanie Thierry (Hedy), Paul Walter Hauser (Simon), Jasper Pääkkönen (Seppo), Johnny Nguyen (Vinh Tran), Lê Y. Lan (Tiên Luu), Lam Nguyen (Quân), Sandy Huong Pham (Michon), Jean Reno (Desroche), Chadwick Boseman (Stormin' Norman), Van Veronica Ngo (Hanoi Hannah), Anh Tuan Nguyen (Chavy), Duc Luong (Bao), Quoc Tuan (Tam).

The re-emergence of Spike Lee as a filmmaker who inspires such fierce debate – debate that goes outside of the typical film press – has been welcome over the past few years, even as I feel the need the point out that Lee never really went anywhere, and his films were always worthy of those debates whether or not they happened. We didn’t get the kind of cultural debates about Lee’s films like Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, Red Hook Summer, Chi-Raq, Pass Over and others deserved – but perhaps those conversations are just lying dormant for now – it took years for people to catch on to the fact that his Bamboozled (2000) was one of his masterpieces, deserving of the kind of introspection that films like Do the Right Thing or Malcolm X always inspired. Yes, Lee’s films are messy – and that leads to a somewhat inconsistent filmography – and often to inconsistent films. But few filmmakers ever are as worthy as a deep dive as Lee is.

His latest film, Da 5 Bloods, is, like his last film, BlackKklansman, one of his best. It’s a film about four black Vietnam vets, returning to the country they fought in 50 years ago on a dual mission. The first is they want to recover the body of their leader – Stormin’ Norman (Chadwick Boseman) who died there in 1971, and the second is to get their hands on a giant cache of gold bars they hid there all those years ago – both of which they thought was lost. It’s better not to think about the ages of the four men played by Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock Jr. and Norm Lewis – which would be at minimum 70 (an age none of them have reached yet – and Lewis isn’t even 60), kind of like you just had to except that Christopher Plummer’s character in Inside Man was probably a couple decades too young. You go with it though – just like you go with the fact that when Lee does flashback to Vietnam, he simply keeps the same four actors playing the same roles, and doesn’t even bother with The Irishman style de-aging. It’s not really the point.

Da 5 Bloods is many things all at once. Lee has never been one to hide his influences – and something like Apocalypse Now gets a massive shout-out that is undeniable. But he’s really making a riff on John Huston’s masterful The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) – about a trip of prospectors, one of whom, played by Humphrey Bogart in one of his greatest performances, goes mad from paranoia and greed (in the wake of Da 5 Bloods, I revisited Huston’s masterpiece – and it’s as powerful as ever). It is also a film about the hidden trauma of black veterans like these men – a story that is too often not told, even in America, which loves nothing more than valorizing the men who fought for their country. Lee tried something similar, with far lesser results, with Miracle at St. Anna – about black WWII soldiers. Here though, he’s perfected it.

The best performance in the movie is by Delroy Lindo as Paul – who is essentially taking on the Bogart role from Sierra Madre. He’s a man whose time in Vietnam has warped and shaped his entire life. His son David (Jonathan Majors) comes along for the ride, and it’s safe to say that their relationship has never been anything close to good. Lindo has become a Trump supporter – he sports a MAGA hat, and the other four mock him a little for supporting “President Bone Spurs”, and say they thought they saw him at one of the Trump rallies playing Step N’ Fetch in the front row. But while Lee uses this to take some cheap (if accurate) shots at Trump – he, and Lindo, certainly don’t make Paul into a one-dimensional villain or idiot. Lindo has always been one of our great character actors – he’s been great in Lee films like Malcolm X, Crooklyn and especially Clockers – and he makes the most out his first collaboration with Lee in 25 years – and one of the few leads of his career. The whole performance is brilliant – paranoia, violent, pained, intense – and he takes it up another notch as the film heads down the homestretch. He doesn’t get Lee’s patented Dolly shot – but he does get another Lee staple, probably most memorably used before now by Edward Norton in 25^th Hour – and it results in the best acting you’re likely to see this year. Perhaps sensing that they cannot outdo Lindo in terms of intensity the two other most prominent performances – by Peters and Majors – go for more subtly. Peters is in particularly great as Otis – his time in Vietnam marked him as much as anyone – but he has become more inward, and introspective. It’s a fascinating performance by Peters – last seen in a Lee film as the preacher with a dark secret in Red Hook Summer. And the performance confirms the massive talent of Majors – who was excellent in last year’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco.

As with many Lee films, Da 5 Bloods does shoot off in all sorts of directions over its two-and-a-half-hour runtime. Like often with Lee, you could say that a shorter, tighter film may have been a better film – and yet, it also would have been less of a Spike Lee film. To me, the digressions in Lee’s films are part of what makes them so special. Here, he has made an entertaining genre, that also lashes out in pain and anger, then connects Vietnam to today, that can begin with Muhammed Ali, end with Martin Luther King Jr., and include so much else. It is classic Spike Lee.

Movie Review Tomasso

Tommaso **** / *****
Directed by: Abel Ferrara.
Written by: Abel Ferrara.
Starring: Willem Dafoe (Tommaso), Cristina Chiriac (Nikki), Anna Ferrara (Deedee).

It has always felt like many of the characters at the center of Abel Ferrara films are some warped version of the man himself. This rogues gallery of characters, most notably Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant (1992), are often violent, drug addicted, sex-addicted men, prone to outbursts, but with a sense of Catholic guilt dragging at them, even as they have mainly left the structures of religion behind them to create their own, warped moral view. His latest film, Tommaso, is much more transparently autobiographical – and is really about what happens to those men if, and when, they finally grow up. It is a film about a toxic man trying to be better – trying to escape from the life he lived for years, but finds it isn’t always that easy.

 In the film, Ferrara regular Willem Dafoe plays Tomasso – a thinly veiled version of Ferrara himself. Now six years sober, the American film director has moved to Rome, gotten married to a woman half his age, Nikki (played by Ferrara’s real wife, Cristina Chiriac) and had a daughter – Deedee (their real daughter, Anna Ferrara). Tomasso mainly tinkers around – working on a screenplay that is probably Siberia, the film Ferrara and Dafoe made after this, taking Italian lessons, stopping for coffee, running theatre rehearsals, attending AA meetings, doing yoga, etc. In those AA meetings, Tomasso tells stories of his troubled, often violent former life – its high, but mostly its lows, particularly how he essentially abandoned his children from a previous relationship – and worries about doing the same thing to Deedee.

The marriage at its core seems, at first, to be mostly solid. Tomasso goes about his life, but most of the day-to-day, minute-to-minute parenting is done by Nikki. There is more than a hint that some unresolved daddy issues may have attracted Nikki to this older man to begin with – but it’s not really examined, perhaps because Tomasso doesn’t want to. Cracks start to form however – Tomasso sees his wife kissing another man, and those old worries, insecurities, and violent tendencies start to surface, as much as he tries to push them back down again. There is certainly a line between fantasy and reality in the film – but it’s never made explicit.

Ferrara seems to have made this film for practically nothing. The deliberately lo-fi camera work is grimy, but not ugly, and in addition to casting his own wife and daughter, shoots much of the film in their own apartment. And Dafoe has worked with Ferrara so often, he likely did it as a favor (Dafoe seems to inspire loyalty in directors – just look at how many times he has works with Ferrara or Paul Schrader or Lars von Trier or Wes Anderson, etc.). Yet that doesn’t mean Dafoe phones it in here – it’s actually one of his best performances. He is quiet here, and yet there is an element of a ticking time bomb here – where we’re all wondering, perhaps even Tomasso himself, just when it’s going to go off. He does, of course.

I cannot argue with those who don’t necessarily want to see a film like Tomasso – which is by and about essentially a toxic, privileged, white-male artist in his 60s just now trying to come to grips with the damage he has done, and improve because of it. Yet the film feels to me to be one of the best of Ferrara’s career – and certainly the most honest. He isn’t making excuses here – I don’t even think he’s asking for forgiveness. He’s simply trying to grow – and its unexpectedly moving to watch him try.

Movie Review: The Hunt

The Hunt *** / *****
Directed by: Craig Zobel.
Written by: Nick Cuse & Damon Lindelof.
Starring: Betty Gilpin (Crystal), Hilary Swank (Athena), Ike Barinholtz (Staten Island), Wayne Duvall (Don), Ethan Suplee (Shut the F**k Up) Gary), Emma Roberts (Yoga Pants), Chris Berry (Target), Sturgill Simpson (Vanilla Nice), Kate Nowlin (Big Red), Amy Madigan (Ma), Reed Birney (Pop), Glenn Howerton (Richard), Steve Coulter (The Doctor), Dean J. West (Martin), Vince Pisani (Peter), Teri Wyble (Liberty), Steve Mokate (Sgt. Dale), Sylvia Grace Crim (Dead Sexy), Jason Kirkpatrick (Rannnndeeee), Macon Blair (Fauxnvoy), J.C. MacKenzie (Paul), Tadasay Young (Nicole), Hannah Alline (Flight Attendant / Not Stewardess / Kelly), Jim Klock (Captain O'Hara), Usman Ally (Crisis Mike).

Ironically, The Hunt would have been easier to dismiss as a too on the nose satire of the “way we live now” had the film just come and gone rather quickly last fall like it was supposed to. The film’s satire is about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the face – as it is about the dangers of dehumanization in America’s current cultural debate – whether people are either braindead rednecks who blindly support an idiot like Donald Trump, or liberal snowflakes who are too overly sensitive about everything. The movie isn’t saying anything particularly revelatory, and many (most) may complain that it’s the definition of “both sides-ism” that paints everyone with the same brush, even if one side is so much worse than the other. Yet, strangely, the fact that the film got caught up in a maelstrom of controversy – led by Trump, who saw nothing but a basic premise, and declared it liberal hogwash – a blood soaked fantasy that proved that the “they” were the real villains – and found so many people willing to go along and decry it, that Craig Zobel’s blunt instrument of a film somehow does feel like the “film we need now” – because it turns out our society is even dumber than we thought it was.

 The premise of the movie is simple – a bunch of NPR listening liberals kidnap a bunch of Trump supporting, climate change denying idiots, and then basically hunt them for sport. It starts when those NPR listening liberals get themselves in trouble – when a supposed private text chain goes public – full of horrible things written about the President which gets them all fired. So the liberals, led by Athena (Hilary Swank) decide to make one of those right-wing nutjob conspiracy theories come true – shipping these redneck to a manor house, where they will be picked off one by one. They do give them a fighting chance – as they all start to come out of their drug induced stupor, they find a huge cache of weapons – although they also open fire on them before they’ve really had a chance to orient themselves. Many die right then and there – but a few escape.

The main character in the film is Crystal played wonderfully by Betty Gilpin in a performance that basically saves the movie. She is smart and tough – knows how to use a gun, and defend herself in many other ways – and can spot a trap a mile away. They idiots she is stuck with on her team though have no real idea what’s going on, or why. She’s basically going to have to kill her way to freedom all by herself.

The Hunt is an odd movie in many ways. The first act seems to set up the rules of the game – the rules for the hunt itself, and then it basically abandons them – to focus on Crystal, the one character who doesn’t seem like a stereotype of either the left or right. She barely seems to care about this divide at all – which is probably sensible given that one side is trying to kill her, and the other side isn’t. But she remains, to the end, a political enigma, perhaps a centrist, or perhaps just someone who is too busy with her own life to worry too much about the culture wars. As she is also the one character in the film who isn’t a complete stereotype, the movie seems to be suggesting that she’s the one to emulate. It’s more than a little ironic in a film about how both sides dehumanize each other, that basically everyone else in the film never become more than that what the other side thinks they are – and it’s really there where the film fails to live up to its premise. Like the original The Purge, there is a better movie lurking somewhere in here than the filmmakers decided to make. The Purge got decidedly more political as the series went on – more ambitious, with a wider scope. I doubt The Hunt will get that chance.

As pure schlock though, The Hunt pretty much works. From that opening melee – with some pretty major actors getting wiped out before they get a chance to utter more than a few words, with heads exploding, blood splattering, people falling on spikes, etc., it’s a gory blast. The movie slows down a little in the following scene – the best in the movie not to include Gilpin – as a couple of the people who escaped come across a mom and pop store and desperately try and get help. From then on, Crystal is our guide – and even as the film offers too many twists and turns for its own good, she keeps things lively. It all ends with the kind of extended, hand-to-hand combat sequence between one of TV’s best actresses (Gilpin has been the biggest reason to keep up with Glow) and a two-time-Oscar winner, slumming it in a cheap exploitation film.

Zobel is capable of better than The Hunt – I loved his breakthrough Compliance a few years ago, for which Ann Dowd should have won an Oscar. Here, like everyone else involved, it’s lowering himself to the material – but having so much fun with it it’s hard to complain. The Hunt isn’t a deep satire – it isn’t really to be. And if the goal ultimately was to get people to see people on the other side as more than just stereotypes, well then, the film fails miserably. Perhaps though this dim-witted satire is the film America needs right now – if only because it proves that nothing is too dumb to take a stand on.

Movie Review: Fourteen

Fourteen **** / *****
Directed by: Dan Sallitt.
Written by: Dan Sallitt.
Starring: Tallie Medel (Mara), Norma Kuhling (Jo Mitchel), Lorelei Romani (Lorelei (5 years), C. Mason Wells (Adam (Mara's boyfriend), Dylan McCormick (Conor (Jo's boyfriend), Kolyn Brown (Leah (Mara's co-worker), Willy McGee (Josh (Jo's boyfriend), Scott Friend (Jonathan (Mara's boyfriend), Evan Davis (David Marshall (Mara's date), Ben Sloane (Tim (Jo's boyfriend), Caroline Luft (Mrs. Mitchel), Strawn Bovee (Mara's mom), Solya Spiegel (Mara's tutee).

The two main characters in Fourteen – Mara and Jo – are one of those pairs of friends where it becomes increasingly hard to tell if it’s more accurate to say that they’ve been best friends since they were fourteen, or were best friends at the age of fourteen, and are just hanging on because it’s easier. The film, written and directed by Dan Sallitt, is a lo-fi drama, which takes place over the span of several years – where scenes can take place eithers hours, days, weeks, months or even years apart, and you only gradually figure out which. They are both young, millennial women trying to get their careers off the ground, their personal lives in order – and it becomes increasingly clear that Mara has more of her shit together than Jo does. But Jo’s problems run deeper than millennial malaise or entitlement – there is mental illness in there as well. But as time passes, Mara finds she cannot keep holding on, keeping being there for whatever the next crisis Jo creates is. She has her own stuff to worry about.

Mara (Tallie Medel) is the main character in the film – she’s the one we follow from scene to scene, as she tries to get things in order. When the film opens, she’s out of school, trying to make it as a writer, but also working as a teaching assistant. She wants a boyfriend, but is more than a little inhibited – less sure of herself than she should be, more suspicious of the men who want her than is healthy. Jo (Norma Kuhling) is the wild card here. Everything she calls up Mara, it’s for another emergency of her own making. In the beginning of the film, Mara is all too willing to drop everything for Jo, eager to talk things through, offer advice, a shoulder to cry on, etc. Jo bounces from one job as a social worker to the next – always assuring Mara that her aversion to working mornings isn’t an issue, despite losing one job after another because of it. She always seems to have an interesting new boyfriend as well. They all like Mara – think she’s “good” for Jo. Eventually though, they keep leaving.

The performances of the two leads are remarkably different, yet work together beautifully. Mara is quieter, more serene – her troubles are relatable to anyone who has struggled through their 20s, trying to find themselves. Kuhling is more like a force of nature – blonde and beautiful, she takes over the screen every time she’s on it. But because she’s blonde and beautiful, people underestimate her own troubles – her own struggles. You assume for a while it’s just self-absorption, and what we could be seeing is the story of a quieter person who needs to learn to stand up to someone who comes in and bulldozes her life repeatedly. Only gradually does Jo’s real issues become clear – the degree of her struggles and demons come out.

Yet, while we end up feeling sorry for Jo, you also feel tremendous empathy for Mara. She is more together, more stable – but has her own issues. She has been dating a man for years, and on the night, they are supposed to sit down and talk about where things are going before he leaves on yet another business trip, Jo shows up at the apartment, unannounced. She had flaked on them, again, for dinner, and now it’s well-past midnight. Mara cannot keep living this way – and as the film progresses into its last few scenes from there, presumably the scenes are farther and farther apart then, it becomes clear she doesn’t.

As a director, Dan Sallitt isn’t going for any fireworks. He apparently admires directors like Erich Rohmer and Hong-sang Soo, and it shows in his unfussy, decidedly low-budget feel. He favors long takes, and when the camera moves, it’s always a very deliberate decision for a deliberate reason. The film keeps pushing into the future, until it’s heartbreaking final scenes. It’s the type of ending full of pain, and yet one where you understand how you got there, and how it really isn’t anyone’s fault. People can only hold on for so long.

Movie Review: Saint Frances

Saint Frances *** ½ / *****
Directed by: Alex Thompson.
Written by: Kelly O'Sullivan.
Starring: Kelly O'Sullivan (Bridget), Charin Alvarez (Maya), Ramona Edith Williams (Frances), Max Lipchitz (Jace), Laura T. Fisher (Donna), Mary Beth Fisher (Carol), Francis Guinan (Dennis), Lily Mojekwu (Annie), Bradley Grant Smith (Corey), Jim True-Frost (Isaac), Rebekah Ward (Cheryl), Braden Crothers (Cortland),

One of the signs of adulthood is when you let out of the lingering resentment you have towards your parents – which happens when you can finally realize that they were just people, trying their best, and often failing. When you’re a kid, you assume adults have everything figured out – but when you become an adult, you realize that nobody does – we’re all just making it up as we go along, and hoping for the best. Saint Frances directed by Alex Thompson and written and starring Kelly O’Sullivan is about that time for the main character – Bridget – when she realizes that even people who seem to have it together have no more of a clue than she does.

Bridget is in her early 30s, and has basically been drifting since she dropped out of college more than a decade ago. She had wanted to be a writer, but that hasn’t worked out, so instead she’s a waitress – although she’s not particularly good at it, nor does she like it very much. Through her friend – who is now married, with a baby, and just moved away, she is put in contact with Maya and Annie (Charin Alvarez and Lily Mojekwu) – a lesbian couple with a six-year-old daughter Frances (Ramona Edith Williams) and a brand new baby. It’s summertime, and Maya will be staying at home, while Lily goes back to work at her high-pressure job. Bridget’s job will basically be to be a nanny to Frances – keeping her occupied during the summer until school starts again, so Maya can concentrate on the baby. Bridget isn’t particularly good with kids – but she wants them, someday, just not now – and early in the film we see her have an abortion with her not-quite boyfriend. But she’s 34 now – and doesn’t much like it when she’s told that Maya’s pregnancy is considered a “geriatric” one because she was older than 35.

In many ways, Saint Frances trod well gone over ground for indie films – the one person in a social group who still seems stuck in their 20s, even though they’re well into their 30s now. Bridget sees the people around her all getting married, having kids, settling down – and she’s no closer to doing that now than she ever was. She drifts from that not quite boyfriend, to another one, and back again – and by the end she’s nowhere really closer to figuring any of it out than she was at the beginning. The difference here though is that she isn’t told by everyone around her that it’s time to settle down and grow up. Just the opposite really – as everywhere she looks, she sees one person after another not really know what they’re doing or where they’re going – even if they have those things Bridget is supposed to want. Her mother even admits that when Bridget was a baby, she fantasized about bashing her head into the wall. But she got through it – and so will Bridget.

The life force in the movie is provided by Ramona Edith Williams as Franny – who the film gets right as a six-year-old kid in that she can be immature and annoying one minute, and absolutely charming and lovable the next. She basically steals the movie – right up to and including her final moment, which is both heartbreaking and hilarious.

I do wish that perhaps Saint Frances had found a little bit more originality somewhere along the line. The film basically hits the notes you expect it to, some in some unexpected ways, but mostly not. But O’Sullivan, as both a writer and an actress, keeps things engaging throughout – even if we’re seeing something we’ve seen before, it feels fresher in her telling than it does most of the time. And that’s mainly because the film doesn’t pull its punches – no one knows what they’re doing, and those who pretend like they do are insufferable. Bridget, like the rest of us, may never quite figure it out.

Movie Review: The Deeper You Dig

The Deeper You Dig *** ½ / *****
Directed by: John Adams and Toby Poser.
Written by: John Adams and Toby Poser.
Starring: John Adams (Kurt), Toby Poser (Ivy), Zelda Adams (Echo), Shawn Wilson (Dell), Joan Poser (Mrs. Minskey). 

The Deeper You Dig is further proof, if any was needed, that you really don’t need all that much to make an effective horror movie. This movie is quite literally a family affair – written and directed by John Adams and Toby Poser, a married couple, that pair also star in the film, alongside their teenage daughter Zelda Adams – who gets a co-director credit here. And there is very little here that would require the family to spend all that much money. This is more of a mood piece that anything else – and that mood is foreboding and dread – set in a small, snow-bound, rural environment. Things build here, rather slowly admittedly, but the atmosphere is right – and the film builds to where it needs to go.

The movie is essentially the three characters played by the family crashing into each other. Kurt (John Adams) lives alone, and one night after too many drinks, is driving down an isolated, snowy road, swerves to miss a dear – and hits something else instead. That turns out to be Echo (Zelda Adams) – who is killed. Kurt buries the body, but he certainly feels guilt over what he has done. Echo’s mother is Ivy (Toby Poser), a psychic who has lost her gift, and is basically just conning people now. But this brings those powers back – and Ivy starts to have some horrifying dreams, that inconveniently, don’t spell out everything she needs to know. She meets Kurt while canvassing for anyone who may have seen Echo, and they become friends of a sort – Kurt obviously feels too bad to tell Ivy what really happened. Echo isn’t just coming to her mother in dreams though – she’s coming to Kurt as well, haunting him, mocking him – and the more he tries to get rid of her, the deeper she sinks her claws into her. She is dead – but she’s not gone.

The story is not an overly original one – although it certainly does take any number of strange twists and turns as it moves along, and you’re never quite sure where it’s going. The performances are all effective as well – I don’t think anyone is winning any Oscars any time soon here, but their performances are impressive in their own way – in body language, and long pauses more than anything. The real treat though is the direction – as the Adams’ family revel in shots that effectively creep you out. Their sense of place is excellent – the snowbound horror movie has always been effective from The Shining to The Thing to the recent The Lodge – and here, on almost no money, they get that overwhelming weight of it all just right. You can sense that the family is reveling in these shots.

The Deeper You Dig is more of an effective mode piece that truly scary – it is about guilt, of course, and the title takes on a few different meanings – a literal one, and some not so literal. It is creepily effective at what it does. Horror filmmakers with 10 times the budget, don’t have the sense of place and the ability to create atmosphere as what is shown here. 

Classic Movie Review: Under the Sun of Satan (1987)

Under the Sun of Satan (1987)

Directed by: Maurice Pialat.

Written by: Sylvie Pialat and Maurice Pialat based on the novel by Georges Bernanos.

Starring: Gérard Depardieu (Donissan), Sandrine Bonnaire (Mouchette), Maurice Pialat (Menou-Segrais), Alain Artur (Cadignan), Yann Dedet (Gallet), Brigitte Legendre (La mère de Mouchette), Jean-Claude Bourlat (Malorthy), Jean-Christophe Bouvet (Le maquignon), Philippe Pallut (Le carrier), Marcel Anselin (Mgr Gerbier), Yvette Lavogez (Marthe), Pierre D'Hoffelize (Havret), Corinne Bourdon (La mère de l'enfant), Thierry Der'ven (Sabroux), Marie-Antoinette Lorge (Estelle).

 

Those who take their faith seriously can be absolutely tormented by it. It is easier to just blindly believe is a benevolent God, who has a plan for you, and will protect you – unless of course it’s your time to go, and then, again, that’s all part of God’s plan. But some of the deepest believers are the ones most tormented by doubts – they take questions of faith seriously – because they take the questions religion raises seriously. And perhaps because they do, they end up doing the most damage.

 

Maurice Pialat’s Palme d’or winning drama Under the Sun of Satan stars Gerard Depardieu as Donissan, a priest who does in fact take questions of religion seriously, and because of that he is plagued by doubts. Those doubts in turn make him a fairly ineffectual priest – unable to provide much in the way of comfort or guidance to his parishioners. His boss and mentor is Menou-Segrais (Pialat himself), who has doubts as well – but is better able to hide them, and deliver something to the parishioners that they need. It may be cynical, but it helps.

 

The key sequence in Under the Sun of Satan takes place when Donissan is sent to walk from his small town to another – over the fields. A man stalks (Jean-Christopher Bouvet) after Donissan, and engaging him in conversation – playing on his doubts. There scenes thrum with even homoerotic of homophobic tension depending of your view on them – and, of course, it slowly becomes clear that this mysterious stranger is Satan himself. As a result of this encounter, Donissan is either blessed or cursed, depending on your view, with some Godlike powers – visions, the ability to heal the sick, etc. But are you still doing God’s work, if the power to do so comes from Satan? And what happens when your good intentions all go awry? Nowhere is this more apparent that with Mouchette Sandrine Bonnaire) – a teenage girl, with a self-destructive streak, engaging in one affair after another with older men – one of whom she has just killed. Donissan wants to save her – but he well damn her instead.

 

Under the Sun of Satan is the kind of talky, heady religious drama that Ingmar Bergman could have done remarkably well. It has a cynical view of, and religion – and questions seriously the notion of God and belief. Naming one of the major characters Mouchette also undeniably brings to mind Robert Bresson’s film of the same name from 1967 – about a young girl suffering through one humiliation after another. Bresson was another filmmaker who could make long, serious conversations about God cinematic and interesting.

 

Unfortunately, I don’t really think that is Pialat’s strong suit. He is better suited in films like Police – large, sprawling casts of people talking over each other, rather than this type of serious, religious drama with long conversations about God, religion and belief. It’s a testament to the performances by Depardieu and Bonnaire that they work as well as they do – although it’s hard to deny that they are merely symbols, not real characters – and no one else is even given that depth. The film looks great – particularly that long journey between towns featuring the scenes with Satan – and the events leading up to Bonnaire’s shocking act of violence.

 

But taken as a whole, Under the Sun of Satan is the type of film that is more interesting to talk about than it is to watch. Everything is here is metaphor and symbolism, and long drawn out conversations. Bresson could have pulled this off. Bergman and Carl Th. Dreyer probably could have too. Hell, at the moment, I’d love to see a Paul Schrader version. But in the hands of the immensely talented Pialat, I just don’t think he quite figured out how to pull it off as anything more than an exercise.