Les Quatre Cents Coups is Wonderful Collision Betweem Bazin's Realism and Truffaut's New Wave Launch

Released in 1959, Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows), is one of the greatest films of all time.  Marilyn Fabe, UC Berkeley Lecturer in Film Studies, captures the subtle cinematographic details in her book Closely Watched Films (2004).  It is 27-year-old Francois Truffaut's autobiographical first feature film. It launched the French New Wave from 1959-1963.  Other New Wave directors included Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, and Eric Rohmer, all of whom wrote polemical articles in the film journal Cahiers du Cinema.  Their cinematic innovations were influenced by their film theories and the nature of the film medium.

Since the inception of motion pictures, the author of the screenplay was felt to be the
'auteur" of the film, as the directors were merely attempting to create a film faithful to the screen writer's vision.  New Wave directors embraced the theories of Alexandre Astruc that cinema was a language in which an artist can express his thoughts in a powerful form, like literature.  New Wave theorists thought the director was the auteur, in control of images, actors, and screenplay revisions.  Auteur theory was challenged by Marx and Freud, who were interested in understanding the process by which a culture's ideology, be it capitalist consumer values or patriarchal ideas about gender, were reproduced and maintained through mass media.  Roland Barthes also invoked a challenge, announcing the death of the author and birth of the reader.  Meaning is determined not by the intent of the author, but by the reader of the text.

In The 400 Blows, Truffaut demonstrates that film can be as emotionally and intellectually evocative and complex as literature.   The story of the film was based on Truffaut's own childhood.  The "400 blows" of the film's title comes from the French idiom "faire les quatre cents coups" which means "to raise hell."  The title has a double meaning.  It also alludes to the blows dealt by insensitive neglectful parents and the bullying school and state authorities.  An unwanted child neglected by his parents, Truffaut took refuge in film.  Antoine Doinel, played by Jean-Pierre Leaud, has the same life history as Truffaut.  Also born out of wedlock, his parents find him a burden.  This is given poignant visual expression when Antoine takes out the garbage.  In a sense, his mother wanted to throw him away in an abortion.

Truffaut ran away from home at age 11 after an excuse for playing hooky backfired.  He claimed he was not in school because his father was taken away by the Germans.  Antoine claims his mother died.  Both Truffaut's and Antoine's adoptive fathers turn them over to the police.  He ends up in the Center for Delinquent Minors where he makes a mad dash for the beach.  Truffaut films Antoine in his moments of freedom in wide angle exaggerating the distance between foreground and background, making the world seem expansive.  At the times when he is caught, Truffaut films him in tightly framed close shots.  His images of Antoine through the grillwork of a holding cell are iconic.  In one shot his face is framed by the grid pattern, resembling a noose around his neck. 

At the ocean's edge, he is trapped.  For his part, Truffaut was rescued by Andre Bazin, who became his substitute father. Since many of the New Wave directors wrote for Bazin's Cahiers du Cinema, the style of their films was influenced by his realist aesthetic.  Antoine's escape from the soccer game and his run to the sea are an homage to Bazin. The 75-second tracking shot in which Antoine runs to the sea demonstrates Bazin's idea that some actions need to be represented in real time in order too be dramatically effective.  We are able to experience the adrenaline-filled exhilaration of his run for freedom.

Finally, Truffaut shocked audiences in 1959 by use of a freeze frame technique to end the film.  The sudden freezing of the frame foregrounds the film medium.  Classic films always hid any awareness of the medium.  Truffaut was willing to expose the artifice of the medium, in effect abandoning Bazinian realism, acting as a metaphor for Antoine's entrapment.  Even the word of the title (FIN) functions not just as a word but as an image.  The letters F-I-N resemble the bars that obscured our view of him in the prison scenes, signaling that Antoine's hope for escape are finished too.

Indian Helicopter Parents over the Top

Kaavya Viswanathan wrote How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life while at Harvard (2006) about Opal's obsession with getting into the big H.  It is a LOL comedy about her parents' effort to make her more interesting and ultimately how she falls for a classmate who is not an object of desire (life's what happens while your busy making plans).  BTW, the title says it all, there's nothing more than the first kiss !  But she captures the high school moment perfectly.  The doting parents create HOWGAL (How Opal Will Get a Life) and have regular strategy sessions with their daughter. 

Funniest line - "he had been very impressed by my familiarity with emerging markets in nanotechnology"  (183). 

One problem - she was caught plagiarizing, including passages from Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories, as well as books by Megan McCafferty, Sophie Kinsella, Meg Cabot, and Tanuja Desai Hidier.  Little, Brown & Co. recalled all copies of the book.

Meet the Patels is a real life documentary directed and filmed by Geeta Patel, who makes a brief appearance towards the end of the film. Here the helicopter parents seek a wife for their son Ravi.  But he has secretly been living with a redhead.  Just like Opal, life (the redhead) is what happens while busy making plans (for "real" partner).  Most Patels derive from Gujarat state.  Ravi's parents, Champa and Vasant, turn out to have an extraordinary relationship and are a testimonial to arranged marriages, much to everyone's chagrin !!

Director Desiree Akhavan Plays Herself in Appropriate Behaviour

Appropriate Behaviour (2014) is a British comedy film, written and directed by Desiree Akhavan, the film stars Akhavan as Shirin, a bisexual Persian American woman in hipster Brooklyn struggling to rebuild her life after breaking up with her girlfriend.  Shirin is struggling to be an ideal Persian daughter (of well-to-do expats), a politically correct bisexual, and a hip young Brooklynite but fails miserably in her attempt at all identities.

Hard to believe she was voted ugliest person at Horace Mann (she commuted from Rockland County). This is a woman who has electric beauty.  I'm always fascinated by young women directors who have the courage to act in their own films.  Akhavan is candid about sex, and she has a great scene when a three-way she’s involved in after a couple pick her up in a bar goes weirdly wrong because the man suspects his partner is into her in ways he doesn’t like. There is also a great moment when she is given self-esteem coaching by the assistant in a lingerie store who says she deserves a great bra: “Just because your breasts are small, it doesn’t mean they’re not legitimate.”  Akhavan has a loopy lampooning spirit, ultimately, and at one point she clocks the deadpan tone of her own film when Shirin lambasts one of her dates, "What's up with your passive disinterest in everything? What happened at Wesleyan that did this to you?"

Ken Burns Masterful at Revising History

This film is a masterful portrayal of 5 teenage boys on a collision course with police investigators overzealous to wrap up prosecution of the rape of a jogger in Central Park.  The PIs planted false testimony on the boys' statements.  It is fasciunating to observe the teenagers constructing layered falsehoods in an effort to protect themselves, never uttering a cry of innocence during the court proceedings.

The Central Park jogger case involved the violent assault, rape, and sodomy of Trisha Meili, a female jogger, in Central Park, on April 19, 1989. The attack left her in a coma for 12 days. Meili was a 28-year-old investment banker at the time, weighing under 100 pounds.  Sarah Burns, the daughter of documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, worked for a summer as a paralegal in the office of one of the lawyers handling a lawsuit on behalf of those convicted in the case. 

Less is More in Batra's Lunchbox

This Indian film is so unBollywood.  Director Ritesh Batra adopted a less-is-more mantra and stuck with it.  Irrfan Khan (Life of Pi) feels The Lunchbox (2013) is the most imortant Indian film in decades based on exportability.  On the one hand it is a love story, but maybe more importantly it is about aging quietly.Khan's widower collides with a vision of untouchable younger beauty in Kaur's lonely housewife.

The film is about the dabbawallahs in Mumbai who transport hot meals to millions of husbands.  A rare mix-up leads to a romance. 

It is interesting to note that Stefan Thomke of the Harvard Business Review (11/2012) analyzed the system as a marvel of robustness.

Yi'nan Diao's Whodunnit Tale of High-Heeled Intrigue

Film noir typically involves a low key black & white visualization punctuated with sexual intrigue and motivation involving a cynical protagonist.  Diao's film is a Chinese neo-noir trope and features a dissolute former detective and a widow with a dark secret.  The film is drenched in neon and wintry industrial bleakness.  Dismembered human remains are showing up in coal cars spread all over northern China.  The dead man is identified as Liang Zhijun, husband to laundry worker and femme fatale Wu Zhizhen (Taiwanese actress).  Now throw disgraced small town ex-cop Zhang Zilli into the mix, a gumshoe every bit as tough as Bogart.  The movie portrays China as a place where human lives are expendable, relationships too.  Conterio notes: Relationships are really just power struggles defined by emotional wants and needs. A presumptuous lawman believes that playing the white knight will end with the object of his fevered desire throwing her arms around him and love blossoming from the soil of prior disillusionment.

Bradshaw (The Guardian) points out the film pays homage to Sir Carol Reed's The Third Man, specifically the scene featuring a Ferris wheel reminiscent of the Vienna Ferris wheel featured in The Third Man.  Soheil Rezayazdi opines:  Diao also adds a nice dollop of surrealism to the proceedings. The film eludes our expectations with bursts of the bizarre: a horse shows up in an office building, a nightclub owner collapses into a bathtub mid-interview, fireworks erupt in the daytime. Black Coal, Thin Ice delivers the essentials of a pulpy noir, and it adorns them with the melancholic spirit and oddball charms of something we haven’t seen before.

From Wiki:  The film's English title Black Coal, Thin Ice is different from its Chinese title Bai Ri Yan Huo, which translates literally as Daylight Fireworks. Diao Yinan came across this phrase from a friend of his. Diao further clarified the meaning of "daylight fireworks" as a state of sentiment or a state of condition. For him, the Chinese and English names together helped to construct the difference between reality and fantasy. In an interview he explained, "Coal and ice both belong to the realm of reality, but fireworks in daylight is something fantastic; they are the two sides of the same coin." The English name refers to the two visual clues in the film: coal as "where the body parts were found" and ice as "where the murder was committed". He further explained, "when the two are combined, the reality of this murder is constructed ... while daytime fireworks is a fantasy, it is what we use to coat ourselves from the cruel side of this real world."

Birchenough opines on the cinematography: Formally, Black Coal… is captivating: the director and his cinematographer Dong Jinsong move between long shots and more frequent tight ones, with as broad a palette of muted, melancholy colors as can be imagined. There’s every possible shade of darkish green and mustard yellow, ochres and olives, varied with deep blues and night greys.  Conterio adds more:   Jingsong Dong's cinematography is sublime. The film looks so beautiful. And neither is it a case of visual grandstanding for the sake of cinema's sake. There is subtlety at play that is quietly impressive. Whether it's a seasonal transition via a road tunnel - from clammy summer to the dead of winter - or faces bathed in colored electric light as they travel on a Ferris wheel in the dark. Mixing daytime exteriors and pastel tones with night-time garish neon, brings out not only neat pictorial contrasts, but also the rich poetic symbolism that envelopes the characters in their search for a second chance and an escape from the past.

Fuerdai walking on eggshells in China

Christopher Beam in BloombergBusiness reported on Chinas's second-generation rich kids or fuerdai.  When not flaunting their wealth in Lamborghinis they occasionally invest in film and mobile-gaming. The Relay China Elite Association is trying to get these kids together to discuss their plight.  Fuerdai are often saddled with emotional trauma.  The first generation of Chinese entrepreneurs came of age in a period of callousness, born during the Cultural Revolution.  During that time there was no humanity.  The fuerdai make an effort to differentiate themselves from their parents, especially when brought up in an environment lacking emotional support and parental affection.   

Romantic relations can be compromised when the young men are content to pay for physical relations with no strings attached.  Instant gratification is just a credit card away.  Many fuerdai are moving money overseas yet do believe in philanthropy at home, it is more than social responsibility, its more about social stability.