1962 Winner, Sundays and Cybele

Sundays and Cybele

Director:        Serge Bourguignon

Distributed by:  Columbia Pictures

Released:  November 1962

Country:  France

In the movies, it’s very common to see love stories in which the man is significantly older than the woman.  Somehow it doesn’t seem as unrealistic as it is in real life—imagine some grandpa who looks like Humphry Bogart (56) ending up with a young girl who looks like Audrey Hepburn (25)—it of course happened in Billy Wilder’s Sabrina (1954).  Honestly, it would probably be weird to see a post-1980 movie with Jack Nicholson hooking up with anyone in his general age bracket.

1962’s Best Foreign Film Sundays and Cybele gives us a relationship in which the age difference is a little more on the unacceptable side, with the guy in his mid-30’s and the girl being a lot younger.  As in 12-years-old.  Now that’s weird.  But this movie isn’t like Lolita, the Stanley Kubrick dark comedy of the same year.  Oddly enough, the man in this relationship, Pierre, isn’t a perv like the old man in that book by Nabakov, and this is definitely not a comedy but an out-and-out tragedy.

Pierre and Cybele

The film starts with an action scene:  Pierre is a fighter pilot in Indochina (now Vietnam, and the subject of 1992’s Best Foreign Film winner, Indochine, starring Catherine Deneuve), flying over a small village and finding he will have to crash land right on a little Vietnamese girl.  We next see Pierre back in France some time later, having a pretty nurse girlfriend, Madeleine, but greatly damaged by his past.  He doesn’t really remember who he is and despite Madeleine’s best efforts, it seems he’s lost his sexual mojo.  But in 1962 France they don’t have Viagra or side-to-side-bathtubs, so Madeleine, faithfully in love with the vacant Pierre, has to take up knitting or kick boxing to work out her frustrations.  She has a male doctor colleague, Bernard, who is more than willing to step into the adjoining tub with her.

But the main focus is on Pierre.  Pierre meets a little girl, Cybele, who is being dumped by her father into a convent to be raised.  It seems the dad was stuck with her somehow and wants nothing to do with her.  Pierre learns of this and feels bad for his new friend.  He poses as her father and picks her up one day so that she can have some time away from her new hated home.  Soon, they make it a regular thing, with Pierre taking her to the park and hanging out and chatting with her for hours every Sunday.

Pierre and Madeleine

He is very innocent about it, no creepy hugs or lingering looks or anything icky like that.  Still, this is a romance of sorts—Cybele calls Pierre her fiancé and he gets intensely jealous when he sees another 12-year old, a boy, chatting with her.  As clueless as he is, Pierre knows to conceal the relationship from Madeleine.  Still, they are out in public all the time, so you know this isn’t going to end well.

Sundays and Cybele is really a sweet movie, and you cannot help hoping for the best for these two lovebirds.  It’s not Pierre’s fault where he is mentally, and Patricia Gozzi as Cybele is such a charming and intelligent girl, it seems odd any father would want to dump her off at a convent.  Hardy Krüger plays Pierre perfectly, a completely sympathetic figure having a relationship that would seem so abhorrent to an outsider.  French composer Maurice Jarre, who won an Oscar for Best Score for Lawrence of Arabia that same year, was also nominated for “Best Music, Scoring of Music, Adaptation or Treatment” for Sundays and Cybele.

"Grandpa, you smell like whiskey and cigars"

The Title:  Les dimanches de Ville d'Avray (Sundays in Ville d'Avray).  Ville d’Avray in the suburb where Pierre takes Cybele to hang out every week.

The culture:  France was out of Vietnam after 1954, when Dien Bien Phu fell, so this must take place sometime in the early 1950’s.  Given Pierre’s state after his crash, this movie can be construed to be one of the earliest anti-Vietnam war movies, in a way.

Agenda danger:  Whatever your view on the vast changes in the past decade or less on American views on sexuality and appropriate relationships, the views on pedophilia largely remain unchanged.  This movie is not an attempt at normalizing this kind of relationship.  The point is, Pierre is really a child like Cybele, and Cybele needed someone who cared about her. 

Best Picture that year:  Lawrence of Arabia

Rating:  The story is as unique as the relationship between Pierre and Cybele.  Honestly, I didn’t much buy into Pierre’s relationship with Madeleine, as it didn’t really make sense to me why she was with him in the first place.  But as potentially disturbing as relationship between the adult man and girl is, they both were realistic about who they were.  Cybele talks about them getting married years from now, when they are both of appropriate age, and for his part, Pierre seems to never have an untoward thought about her in his head.  For my money, their relationship seemed a lot more likely than Grandpa Bogart and fresh-out-of-cooking-school Sabrina.

1963 Winner, 8½

8½

Directors:      Federico Fellini

Distributed by:  Embassy Pictures (in U.S.)

Released:  February 1963

Country:  Italy

Anyone who has ever had to write anything of any length, be it an assignment or something done voluntarily, knows what “writer’s block” is.  Staring at a blank page, trying to come up with an idea to start things off, is the worst.  And I can tell you, reviewing a Fellini movie like 8½, 1963’s Best Foreign Film, is a good way to come up with writer’s block.  Not only is this movie is a tough nut to crack, but it is considered a masterpiece.  What can I possibly add?

Well, the honest answer is nothing.  However, I’m not alone in my writer’s block.  The film is about a director, Guido, who essentially has writer’s block, only it’s in relation to his being a director.  Presumably, Guido is really a stand-in for Fellini himself, trying to figure out what he wanted to say in this big budget science fiction he is doing.  Guido is unsure of himself and his relationship with the women in his life. In other words, he’s just like every other guy, except he needs to figure out a way to translate his feelings into film.

Mastroianni and Aimee

The movie starts with a traffic jam.  But unlike the singing, dancing kind in Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, this one is stifling and claustrophobic to the point of suffocating Guido in his car.  He cannot breathe, but finally escapes the death trap automobile and floats to the clouds.  Next, he’s a human kite with a rope around his leg, and when he returns to earth, he does so violently and at the hand of his critics.  This is what “director’s block” is for Guido, and this is the movie where Fellini abandoned neo-realism for imagery and symbolism.

Essentially, Guido is trying to figure out what to put in his film.  He is played sympathetically, and often comically, by Marcello Mastroianni, one of Italy’s biggest stars.  Intertwined with this “director’s block” of Guido’s is his relationship to all the women of his life.  First, there’s his mistress, the curvaceous and uncouth Carla, whom he keeps around for one obvious reason.  His wife Luisa, played by A Man and a Woman’s Anouk Aimée, comes to visit him on the set, and his hopes that the two can reconcile don’t seem too promising.  Then there’s his “Ideal Woman,” who is at first just a fantasy, but materializes late in the film as the actress he’s been waiting for.  She’s played by Claudia Cardinale, perhaps best known to American audiences for her role in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West.  Guido’s views on women are best shown in his extended fantasy that begins with a harem of women existing only to serve him, ending a whole lot less enjoyably.  As confused as Guido is, it’s hard not to envy him just a little for having all these women revolve around him.

Claudia Cardinale in Once Upon a Time in the West

No doubt this is an odd film, from its strange start to its bizarre finish.  Martin Scorsese said in an interview once that in introducing his daughter to this movie, he knew he first had to show her some of Fellini’s earlier, more accessible works, like 1960’s La Dolce Vita, because 8½ is such a tough one to get your head around.  Well, I don’t know about that.  What I can tell you is you cannot expect to pick up on everything when you first watch it; but significantly, you can get the point of the movie without necessarily understanding every scene.  This is film as art: a well-shot, black-and-white masterpiece about relationships and directing and yes, writer’s block.  If you just type away, or in Guido’s case, direct away, you’ll get through it, even if in the end it isn’t as good as you would have liked it to be.  Like this review.

Opening scene in La La Land

The Title:  Otto e mezzo.  Previous to this movie, Fellini did six feature films, two short films, and co-directed a film; by his math, that’s 7½ pictures.  This one would be his 8½th.  I guess he had writer’s block when coming up with the title.

The culture:  There is some Italian culture from the early ‘60’s in here, but more to the point, this is a movie about the culture of filmmaking.  Roger Ebert called it “the best film ever made about filmmaking.”  Certainly it surpasses Truffaut’s film Day for Night, Best Foreign Film from 1973, a pleasant enough movie also about a director dealing with the difficulties of directing a film.  But what I kept thinking about was the terrific documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, made by Eleanor Coppola.  That movie is about how her famed director-husband, Francis Ford Coppola, just about went off his rocker making his epic Vietnam War drama Apocalypse Now.  In that movie, Coppola also has director’s block, not knowing how to finish the movie, and plowing through anyhow.

8½ opening scene

Agenda danger:  Fellini is basically criticizing his own failings in this film, and really there is no political persuasion to this story.

Best Picture that year:  Tom Jones.  It’s not unusual for the Best Foreign Film to be much more noteworthy and acclaimed than the Best Picture of the same year.  This is one instance.

Rating:  Take Martin Scorsese’s advice—this is a great one to watch after having seen La Strada (review coming) or even Amarcord (which is reviewed here).  But you can’t watch 8½ without realizing you are watching a great film.  Mastroianni is a pleasure to watch, and the fantasy scenes, though sometimes difficult to interpret, are interesting and often humorous, like a good dream.  My feeling is that anyone seriously studying film needs to see this, but it isn’t so bad for the average movie-watcher either.

Off for Independence Day

Happy 4th of July!

It didn't seem appropriate to review a foreign film on Independence Day.  So I give you this, a speech from Jeff Daniels, as Col. Joshua Chamberlain, in the 1993 movie Gettysburg, adapted from Michael Shaara's fictional novel, The Killer Angels.

"Here, we judge you by what you do, not by who your father was. Here, you can be something."

Director: Robert Maxwell

Distributed by: New Line Cinema

Released: October 1993

Country:  United States of America!