Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. He will be contributing a series of "critic's notes" to the Scarecrow blog—a chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connecting them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
Jean Eustache at SIFF
He was a kind of auxiliary member of the French New Wave, whose work crested in the 70s. He made one of the greatest films ever, The Mother and the Whore (1973), a 217-minute study of Parisians talking and fretting and sorting through the aftermath of the era that had just happened to them. I wrote about a restoration of this masterpiece when it was re-released circa 1997, and I can't find my writing on it, which I regret. Will I ever see this movie again? Its Everest-like running time seems far more insurmountable to me now than it did in 1997, even if I am curious about revisiting it—but this is age talking, and the movie is about youth, though never in a nostalgic way, and indeed its portrait of youth involves people who may no longer be young. The embodiment of that is found in the actors who go through Eustache's paces, led by Jean-Pierre Leaud, Bernadette Lafont, and Francoise Lebrun.
SIFF has been presenting a program of Eustache's films, including The Mother and the Whore (that one has one more screening on Sunday 7/23), and I am extremely impressed that they're doing this. It would be nice to believe that some people showed up to see films such as these—or is that era, too, in the past?
The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future
It can be said that grabby visual imagery will only get you so far, but on the other hand, that's still getting you somewhere. This film from Chile is dotted with grabbers, and goes quite a ways beyond that. I saw it at the Guadalajara Film Festival in 2022, where I was on a jury; it wasn't part of my jury's competition but it sounded interesting, and even within the hubbub of a festival it stood out for its clarity of vision. In an early sequence we witness a woman (Mia Maestro) rise from the depths of a river, clad in a motorcyclist's gear—a strange image, somehow connected to a dying fish on the shore. But the situation is even stranger: She's been dead for many years, despite looking fresh as a daisy, and she visits her family, who are understandably discombobulated by her reappearance.
Francisca Alegria's film (her first feature) might skate by on this magical-realist premise alone, but it has more in it, from ecological-fable-making to some extraordinary scenes of the natural world, including animals. (She even uses a drone camera in a more evocative way than the usual "look how high we can go with this thing.") From the workings of a dairy farm to the haunting image of a cow at night, there's much in the movie that weaves a spell. The Northwest Film Forum has it playing in the next few days, and it is one of those movies that benefit from the theatrical experience—not because of the size of the screen so much as the chance to dream your way into a world without interruption.
July 21, 2023
Robert Horton is a member of the National Society of Film Critics.
