Five Short Recommendations, Available on Netflix

A friend of mine who just finished school asked me if I could suggest some films for him to watch on Netflix Instant. I've written a number of annotated recommendations for him, so I figured I may as well share slightly edited versions here as well. I'll roll these out every so often, and I may write longer pieces on any of these in the future. Each of the films below were available on Netflix Instant in the USA at the time this was published.

House of Pleasures
L'Apollonide (Souvenirs de la maison close) / House of Tolerance
2011, France
Bertrand Bonello

You could spend an entire day coming up with adjectives to describe this film about the young women, their madame, her children, their clients, and the ghosts that inhabit a Parisian whorehouse at the dawn of the 20th century: beautiful, frightening, elegant, decadent, erotic, mysterious, haunting, radical, moving, difficult, luminous, and so on. But none of those words could accurately describe the total experience of watching Bertrand Bonello's unshakeable masterpiece.

With: Noémie Lvovsky, Alice Barnole, Céline Sallette, Adèle Haenel, Hafsia Herzi, Iliana Zabeth, Jasmine Trinca, Laurent Lacotte, Xavier Beauvois, Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, Jacques Nolot, Judith Lou Lévy, Anaïs Thomas, Pauline Jacquard, Maïa Sandoz, Joanna Grudzinska, Esther Garrel, Pierre Léon, Jean-Baptiste Verquin, Michel Peteau, Marcelo Novais Teles, Guillaume Verdier, Justin Taurand, Damien Odoul, Paul Moulin, Henry Lvovsky, Paolo Mattei, Frédéric Epaud, Anaïs Romand, Vincnet Dieutre, Bertrand Bonello, Pascale Ferran

Domain
Domaine
2009, France/Austria
Patric Chiha

In what was John Waters' unexpected (but not unusual) favorite film of 2010, Béatrice Dalle, still a smoldering presence onscreen twenty years after Betty Blue, plays an alcoholic mathematician who is also a sort of mentor to her beautiful gay teenage nephew (Isaïe Sultan). It's neither a coming-of-age story nor a PSA for addiction, but instead a rather intimate portrait of the alternately tender and toxic relationship between these two misfits. There's a great club scene a little over half way into the film where a bunch of people dance bizarrely in a smoke-filled, infinitely negative space.

With: Béatrice Dalle, Isaïe Sultan, Alain Libolt, Raphaël Bouvet, Sylvia Roher, Bernd Birkhahn, Udo Samel, Tatiana Vialle, Manuel Marmier, Gisèle Vienne, Gloria Pedemonte, Thomas Landbo

Flirting with Disaster
1996, USA
David O. Russell

Flirting with Disaster was a film I couldn't appreciate at a young age for a variety of reasons, but revisiting it as an adult had me crying with laughter. David O. Russell's brand of humor is a unique blend of chatty New York high-brow and slapstick-y absurdism, which you can also see at work in I Heart Huckabee's, a film I've changed my opinion on at least three times. While Ben Stiller is easily replaceable in the central role of the new daddy who wants to find his birth parents before naming his son, the entire supporting cast is priceless, particularly Mary Tyler Moore as Stiller's high-strung adoptive mother, Téa Leoni as the hapless psychology student documenting the eventual reunion, and–above all–Lily Tomlin, who steals the show.

With: Ben Stiller, Patricia Arquette, Téa Leoni, Mary Tyler Moore, George Segal, Alan Alda, Lily Tomlin, Richard Jenkins, Josh Brolin, Glenn Fitzgerald, Celia Weston, David Patrick Kelly

Mademoiselle
1966, France/UK
Tony Richardson

It would be too easy to dismiss Mademoiselle as simply a historical oddity. The screenplay was originally written by Jean Genet as a present to actress Anouk Aimée, but he reportedly sold it unbeknownst to her, and it was eventually reworked by author Marguerite Duras to be the first (and only, I believe) French-language film by director Tony Richardson, starring the one-and-only Jeanne Moreau (for whom the closeted bisexual Richardson left wife Vanessa Redgrave) and, at some point, Marlon Brando, though his casting never actually panned out. All that bizarre history aside, Mademoiselle is perfectly wicked, and Moreau is flawless as the child-hating, sexually repressed, arsonist schoolteacher, whose loins become inflamed when she meets a strapping Italian woodsman.

With: Jeanne Moreau, Ettore Manni, Keith Skinner, Umberto Orsini, Georges Aubert, Jane Beretta, Paul Barge, Pierre Collet, Gérard Darrieu, Jean Gras, Gabriel Gobin

The Lovers on the Bridge
Les amants du Pont-Neuf
1991, France
Léos Carax

Les amants du Pont-Neuf was a highly-ambitious project from French auteur Léos Carax–whose latest film Holy Motors (which stars his usual leading man Denis Lavant alongside Eva Mendes and Kylie Minogue!) is supposed to be absolutely spectacular–one which involved numerous reshoots, delays and eventually an entire reconstruction of the Pont Neuf, the oldest bridge across the Seine. There's probably no more appropriate way to describe Carax as an artist other than a visionary, and this is (not counting Holy Motors, which I haven't seen) his magnum opus, a small tale of a romance between a street performer (Lavant) and a painter (Juliette Binoche) who is going blind, told with dazzling opulence in grand measure. WARNING: Unfortunately, Netflix seems to be streaming a cropped version of the film. It looks like it's in 1.33:1 ratio, when it should be 1.85:1 (see the photo above). Such a shame for a film that utilizes the entirety of its frame so beautifully.

With: Denis Lavant, Juliette Binoche, Daniel Buain, Edith Scob, Klaus-Michael Grüber, Marion Stalens, Chrichan Larsson, Paulette Berthonnier, Roger Berthonnier, Georges Aperghis, Michel Vandestien

She said "Fuckabees"

I Heart Huckabees - dir. David O. Russell - 2004 - USA

I Heart Huckabees has always been one of the stranger failures of the past few years. When the film came out, writer-director David O. Russell somehow was given the title of “American auteur” along the likes of other less-than-five-film showponies like Paul Thomas Anderson and Darren Aronofsky. I mean, what did he direct prior? Three Kings and Flirting with Disaster? Sure, those two were decent films, but hardly worthy of throwing such a title upon Russell. He assembled a noteworthy cast (aside from Schwartzman) for what was dubbed an “existential comedy,” or a slapstick farce for intellectuals. Somehow, the film ended up being as deep as a plastic kiddy pool, but this was of no fault to the cast, as they end up being uniformly excellent. Putting notable dramatic actors like Isabelle Huppert, Naomi Watts, Jude Law, and Mark Wahlberg in a comedy as silly as this one sounded like a bad idea, but all four held their own against comic veterans like Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman (with Wahlberg being the real stand-out). Russell claimed to have made this film because he found Buddhism, so are we to interpret that Buddhism (at least for him) is as shallow and farcical as the film he made about his transformation? Or could I be wrong about Russell and his intentions?

I Heart Huckabees takes a bold stand, putting the philosophical and ethical quandaries that often serve as subtext in the foreground. “It’s like that story about the cave,” Watts exclaims during one scene. While this method works on certain levels, it certainly doesn’t on any grand scheme. Someone who hasn’t taken their undergraduate initiation course in philosophy might decipher that such schools of theory (as represented in opposition by Tomlin and Hoffman versus Huppert) are as simple as black and white. Seeing Schwartzman’s real mother, Talia Shire, call Huppert a bitch and then be chastised for her cruelty may inspire some tongue-in-cheek laughs, but Russell presents Huppert’s nihilism as the direct converse of Tomlin and Hoffman’s mere existentialism. One of the beauties of philosophy, even philosophy as taken from a novice level as Russell appears to be assuming, is the ambiguity and gray area that is absent here. I don’t consider myself any real authority on philosophy, but it doesn’t take a masters degree to spot the errors in Russell’s theories.

There are moments of true hilarity that occur within the film, especially during a dinner table scene where Mark Wahlberg challenges Republican/Christian beliefs with Jean Smart, but all this proves is Russell’s comic abilities. He can push amazing performances out of his cast (even if the always-lovely Huppert is underused) and mold comical situations skillfully, but with such lofty ambitions in a film like I Heart Huckabees, these feel like minor accolades. There’s little question as to why the cast was drawn to this film, but to have them acting in a superficial farce such as this is a grave waste. While watching the film, you almost question whether Russell is trying to criticize and parody these ideas. It might almost work, if he had a greater grasp on what they truly meant. Don’t let Russell fool you; the world isn’t black and white, and philosophy isn’t as digestible and frivolous as he might lead you to believe.