feeling listless

Film A freebee in Saturday's copy of The Guardian lets me sample their DVD rental service. Visit the site, select a disc, 3.75 rental and postage and three days later it's through your letter box. Although it's a fairly pointless excercise for mainstream films (which are available at Blockbuster and for sale in some places for not much more, for the more obscure offerings its fabulous. That Tarkovsky movie you were meaning to get around to but don't want to buy because you can't imagine dozing through it more than once. They have it. My selection arrived today in a little plastic envelope which, through a transformer-like magic turns into the return envelope. It's disc only in a little snapcase, presumably to keep down postage but who needs the badly written spoiler ridden plot summary on the back anyway?

I went for Le Regle Du Jeu the film Jean Renoir made during the cusp of the French occupation in 1937. I had wanted to catch up on my French New Wave, but presumably in the wake of The Dreamers everything was out. So looked at their influences instead. Renoir's film tells the story of a group of French aristrocrats and their servants getting together for a weekend of hunting and meriment. Multiple stories are told within both households as hearts are broken, arguments ensue with grave consequences. If this sounds familiar, it's fairly obvious that it was an influence for Julien Fellows and Robert Altman when they created Gosford Park. The scenes when the servants help their masters through the door using their umbrellas is spookily similar, as is a later moment when the staff sit down for dinner.

Like the Altman, in places the characters seem attrociously unsympathetic. It's about a hunting party and believe me when I say that many animals (mostly rabbits and pheasants) were hurt in the making of this film. There is a an uncomfortable seam of racism and anti-sematism running though the piece which appear with such a light touch it's hard to tell whether this was an affectation of the time or a decision taken by Renoir as a reflection of the feelings which were running through polite conversation at a time when Hitler was consolidating his place in Europe. What undoubtedly leads the film to it's classic status are the film making techniques on display. In a time before steadycams the camera weaves in and out of the set; there is a pace to the piece which I've haven't seen in many films of the time, with quite a ferocious amount of editing which must have been murder on the cut and paste method of the time. And many of the performances are shockingly naturalistic in their own way, Brando eat your heart out.

What with catching up with the backlog of films I've taped over the past couple of years I've been watch a lot of international film. Unlike Hollywood, the only rule I've observed is that there are no rules. Even in something like Aki Kaurism?ki's The Man Without A Past which has roughly the same set up as Doug Liman's version of The Bourne Identity (man turns up not knowing who he is and with few clues), we have no idea were it's going -- there is a narrative freedom overiding our strict expectations of a beginning, middle and end, and what usually happens at each juncture. Reading Syd Field's books about writing screenplays you couldn't imagine there is another way of doing it. There is. Of course there is. I've seen it time and again over the past few months, from The Hour of the Wolf to Kandahar. But in a way I feel like I've been trained out of watching a standard English-language movie. When I saw The Runaway Jury the other week it was a bit of a shock. Although it hides itself under a ton of editing and dialogue the story is massively conventional. Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman might as well be wearing a white hat and black hat respectively. It's a good job I love all film or I could find myself sidelined.