Hotel Du Nord (1938)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Hotel Du Nord (1938) – M. Carné

Fatalistic and willing to look into the void, Marcel Carné’s poetic realist film begins with a failed double suicide pact and moves forward from there, deciding eventually that there is but one true love that we are destined to find.  Although perhaps this destiny is not for everyone, because Louis Jouvet’s mysterious ex-gangster winds up with no one (accepting an avoidable death instead).  Arletty (playing a prostitute more frankly than Hollywood would allow) manages to struggle along making the best of her lot, pragmatically, losing Jouvet but settling for comic everyman Bertrand Blier instead.  These are just a few of the characters and stories that populate the Hotel Du Nord, a low rent bar/hotel that feels like a real community albeit in an art-directed Paris created on a sound-stage with two dimensional backdrops (the poetic atmosphere that envelops the kernel of realness in the events and characters).  On the eve of WWII (not even hinted at), an uncomfortable sense of the inescapable hangs ominously over the film (the sorrow and the pity were yet to come, particularly for Arletty).  But at a deeper level, the yin and yang of existentialism and fatalism hold the viewer transfixed in the balance.   Carné went on to make his masterpiece Les Enfants du Paradis a few years later under the auspices of the Vichy government.

  

All That Jazz (1979)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

All That Jazz (1979) – B. Fosse

Musical theatre and dance aren’t really my thing, so some of director/choreographer Bob Fosse’s epic and excoriating paean to himself was probably lost on me.  But it is epic and not unrelated to Fellini’s 8 ½, which also took the director’s own life as a starting place for an extended fantasy/nightmare.  Roy Scheider is the surprising lead (surprising because he never seemed like a song-and-dance man to me) and he pulls off the chain-smoking, speed-taking, rascally irresponsible promiscuous character just fine, including the singing/dancing finale.  I’ll admit that the film drags at times:  I had more than enough of the clips of Cliff Gorman playing Lenny Bruce riffing on Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s stages of death, a scene from the movie (presumably Lenny, 1974) that Gideon/Fosse is editing while also getting a Broadway show together.  Of course, death is a main theme here because Fosse had been warned that his was being hastened by heart problems (presumably brought on by his lifestyle; he eventually died of a heart attack in 1987).  The film maintains a reasonably linear trajectory but bounces in and out of reality, presumably lingering in Gideon/Fosse’s thoughts or even perhaps in the immediate anticipated afterlife (where Jessica Lange plays an angel) and dance sequences are liberally spread throughout, culminating in that finale.  You don’t feel that the musical setpieces interrupt the story – they _are_ the story – and Fosse had the balls to make them his story.