What I write when I’m not writing here (part 1 of two)

Jean Seberg in Godard's segment of
The World's Greatest Swindlers

Every nook and cranny on the Internet exists for one thing. No, not porn – relentless self-promotion! Thus, I herewith offer a number of the reviews I’ve done for the Disc Dish site. The reviews are in-depth, filled with information gleaned in the watching and reading of supplemental materials, and (I hope) entertaining.

I haven’t done an entry on my work for DD since 2015, so this piece will be broken into two parts. Screw streaming – support the little silver disc industry! 

The anthology film The World’s Most Beautiful Swindlers has been very hard to see over the last few decades. It includes two good episodes from Japanese and Italian directors, but is most notable for having a characteristically amoral entry from Claude Chabrol and Godard’s only reunion with Jean Seberg – a short in which she plays a journalist in Marrakesh.

The Criterion re-release of Ghost World includes old and new supplements. It also reminds us how good a film based on a comic book can be. 

The Kino release of Josef von Sternberg’s final film, Anatahan, contains the director’s re-edit of the film (including nudity) and supplements that discuss both Sternberg’s career and the difference between the two versions of the film.

I am a major fan of Francis Ford Coppola’s low-key character studies, and Rumble Fish is one of his most brilliantly stylized features.

Leos Carax’s sublime Lovers on the Bridge finally was issued in a deluxe edition on disc. 

Multiple Maniacs, John Waters’ second feature, received the Criterion treatment, with the no-budget 16mm film being restored into a pristine shape it never had in the first place.

Fassbinder’s Fox and His Friends remains one of the filmmaker’s most important statements about the exploitation of a minority by people in that minority.

The seminal caper film, The Asphalt Jungle, joins the ranks of Criterion’s releases.

One of the best modern Westerns, Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller, reappears in a deluxe edition.

The documentary Eat That Question is comprised entirely of interview footage with Frank Zappa (with a tiny bit of his music).

Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is that thing of rare radiance – a spoof of an era made while that era is still going on.

The film that made Luis Bunuel want to be a filmmaker, Fritz Lang’s Destiny, finally gets a prestige release on disc.

Terrence Malick’s The New World appeared on disc in a director’s cut that “balances” the segments of the film in a better way.

Malick's New World

Alain Resnais’ Muriel reveals his genius for shuffling time and memory.

One of the finest black comedies of all time, Dr. Strangelove, comes ready with new supplements and a host of the older ones.

Olivier Assayas has been showcasing the talents of Kristen Stewart in the last few years. In Clouds of Sils Maria, she joins Juliette Binoche for a character study concerning friendship between women of different ages. 

Wim Wenders: The Road Trilogy groups together three of his best early films, including the epic-length but still small in scope classic Kings of the Road.

Bogart gave arguably his best performance in Nick Ray’s hard-hitting noir In a Lonely Place. 

Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street, Sam Fuller’s delirious crime picture, finally gets a prestige release.

Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson’s The Forbidden Room offers stories within stories (and a sterling cast led by Charlotte Rampling and Udo Kier). 

Out 1 is one of the late Jacques Rivette’s masterworks, a 13-hour film that reflects the post-’68 mindset in France and offers one of the filmmaker’s best paranoid fantasies.

An underrated comic portrait of an era, Serial skewers self-help and new-age philosophies and movements.

Wim Wenders’ The American Friend is a masterful character study, allegory, and crime picture with two great lead performances by Bruno Ganz and Dennis Hopper.

Bruno Ganz in The American Friend

Burroughs: the Movie comes back into distribution, replete with outtakes.

The Mr. Warmth box set offers several Don Rickles specials and every episode of his sitcom CPO Sharkey.

Alain Resnais’ long-“missing”sci-fi love story Je t’aime, je t’aime finally receives a restoration and a U.S. release.

The superb box set comprised of episodes from the visionary PBS series The Great American Dream Machine reminds us how good and far-ranging PBS programming was in the Seventies.

Standup comedian and Lefty troublemaker Barry Crimmins is profiled in Bobcat Goldthwait’s funny and poignant Call Me Lucky.

A never-before-seen Frank Zappa concert film, Roxy: The Movie, finally saw a release nearly 40 years after it was shot. 

The American Dreamer is a portrait of Dennis Hopper in the period after Easy Rider, when he was one of the most sought-after filmmakers in America (and one of the craziest).

Put them all together, they spell…: Huppert in ‘The Mother’

Huppert, official portrait for
The Mother (photo: Peter Lindbergh)

When you have the opportunity to see one of the finest actresses in the world in live performance, you should jump at the chance. Especially if she is Isabelle Huppert, and even if she appears in a play as obvious and belabored as The Mother, currently at the Atlantic Theater Company in Manhattan (now through April 13).

Huppert is a miraculous performer who seems to choose her roles on the basis of how much they will challenge her and how complicated — and tormented — these women are. In the process she has created an incomparable portrait gallery that gets better with each year, even when the films or plays she stars in are significant only because she is in them.

Such is the case with The Mother, a modernist empty-nester lament in which the titular character, portrayed perfectly by Huppert, has lost her mind because her children have grown up and left home. The unseen daughter isn’t that much of a loss to her, but her son… well, therein lies the drama (and dark comedy and sleek stagecraft).

The opening scene finds Anne (Huppert), a jumpy wife, greeting her husband as he comes home from work with accusations and insults. Then we see the same scene in a less contentious mode. That pattern continues for the whole play — first we view events from Anne’s shattered perspective and then we see a more sedate version. Anne is a Frenchwoman living in the U.S. (one assumes the change in the play was made to accommodate Huppert’s strong French accent) with a busy workaholic husband (Chris Noth), who may be having an affair or just stays overtime at work to avoid Anne.

Their daughter is never seen and barely referred to, but her son (played by African American actor Justice Smith) is her pride and joy — and she is overjoyed when he argues with his girlfriend (Odessa Young) and ends up back at the family home.

Anne’s version of things includes the characters making declarative statements about themselves that are remarkably unsubtle — this is one of the play’s surprises that rather quickly tires itself out. Anne tells her hubby “I’ve been had” (in reference to getting married and having kids), the son’s girlfriend proclaims “I’m young and beautiful,” and the son announces to his mother at one point that he will hug her very tightly (the second half of that declaration would constitute a spoiler — and is subsequently undone when we leave Anne’s mind).

One could blame the fact that The Mother is a translated play for the intermittently stodgy dialogue, but Florian Zeller is a critically lauded French playwright and the translator here is Christopher Hampton, who makes a specialty of adapting such things to English. One can take comfort in the fact that the play is only 85 minutes long and the central reason for attending, Huppert, is sitting onstage as the audience files in. (She is reading a book, hides her face behind said book, making mischievous faces and yawning every so often.)

The stagecraft adds to the play’s general air of discomfort. Drug vials and bottles of wine are hidden below and behind an ultra-modern couch, projected signs on the back wall give us the numbers of the versions of scenes (“un,” “deux,” “trois”), and a microphone is situated at the edge of the stage so that Anne can deliver a nervous speech about her son (useful here as a dodge to shift our attention from the movement of furniture on the set).

The cast of The Mother: Smith, Huppert, Young, Noth.

The performers make the most of the material and add emotion to what is an overly simplistic scenario. Odessa Young admirably plays the son’s girlfriend and two other fantasy figures in Anne’s visions. Justice Smith has the most difficult role, as the barely sketched son who primarily tries to avoid his mother’s overly Freudian embrace (at one point the very drunk Anne does indeed straddle her son on the floor). Chris Noth lends shading to the “Father,” who is alternately a caring husband and an adulterous prick.

Huppert has inhabited this terrain before, as an incestuous mom in Christophe Honoré’s Ma Mere (2004). Here she works on several levels, being at once neurotic, stubborn, caring, cruel, schizo, and also very sexy. Huppert is one of the most fearless performers currently working, and here that includes playing a 47-year-old mother who dons a red dress and hose and garters onstage at one point.

As I noted the last time I reviewed Huppert onstage, she is the primary reason to see The Mother. In this case, the “queen of meltdowns” plays a woman who is already on the edge when the play begins.

As she has done so often onscreen, she exquisitely incarnates a woman who is on a downward spiral and in the process inspires admiration for her craft, if not deep sympathy for the character.