Quai des Orfevres (1947)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Quai des Orfevres (1947) – H.-G. Clouzot

A dogged policeman (Louis Jouvet) investigates a married music hall couple after a repugnant film producer and pornographer turns up dead in Clouzot’s first post-war film (prior to well-known thrillers Les Diaboliques and The Wages of Fear).  Not exactly noir and not exactly police procedural but blending elements from these genres with the backstage musical (albeit the particularly French kind).  Bernard Blier (the husband and accompanist) is spurred to passionate jealousy by Suzy Delair’s (the wife and singer) willingness to flirt with producers to advance her career.  Thus, he is suspect number one when she gets mixed up with the soon-dead producer – or perhaps she is suspect number one – or perhaps their lesbian friend downstairs is suspect number one?  With Jouvet on the trail, the clues start to fall into place in a satisfying way – although Clouzot is much more interested in l’affaire de coeur than in any diddly-squat murder investigation.  Top notch.

  

The Salt of the Earth (2014)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Salt of the Earth (2014) – W. Wenders & J. R. Salgado

The still photographs by Sebastiao Salgado at the heart of this documentary are worth the price of admission alone.  As Wenders intones at the start of the film, they are paintings made of light.  But these photos are also so rich in their complexity (or alternately their simplicity), that they are almost psychedelic in the way they heighten your experience, your understanding of the photographer’s experience of the subject…and something of the subject’s experience as well.  Around these images, other stories are told, mostly about Salgado and his life: he escaped from dictatorial Brazil to Paris and then ventured all around the world, witnessing great suffering in Africa in particular, and then later the serenity of nature.  Although Wenders is but a partner in this enterprise (with Salgado’s son), it is hard not to think about his career and its latest resurgence in documentary films – his vision and worldview are still as rewarding as they once were.  Yet, one can’t help also to think about his contemporary Werner Herzog and what wonders he might have extracted from these images and the complicated ethics of the observer cum participant.  Of course, then the film would have been about Herzog above all else; Wenders wisely stays mostly in the margins, allowing Salgado and his poetic and heartbreaking images to stay in focus.

  

Hara-Kiri (1962)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Hara-Kiri (1962) – M. Kobayashi

Kobayashi’s film feels like a horror film or at the very least a potently grim fable.  Told mostly in flashback by Tatsuya Nakadai, a masterless samurai, who has turned up at the castle of the Ii clan, asking permission to commit ritual suicide to end his miserable life.  The stark black and white serves only to highlight the stark coldness of the feudal system and its unfeeling code of honour (that may be really just a front for authoritarians who take pleasure in sadistic treatment of underlings, or so Kobayashi seems to be implying).  As his story progresses, Nakadai’s samurai gradually reveals his hand, undermining the moral rectitude of the clan that has put on such airs of superiority.  Of course, the film crescendos with violence and ends very bleakly.  In 2012, Miike Takashi remade the film in colour and 3D but that version seems almost pointless in its close transcription of the powerful and gripping original. Unbearably tense.