EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE (YouTube). This American independent film, written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, won the Oscar for best film. I don’t know about you, but I sat there, not having a clue what was going on. A kind friend tried to enlighten me. I am still none the wiser.
INLAND EMPIRE (StudioCanal). David Lynch’s three-hour time-warp abstraction also left me totally confused. Laura Dern looks anguished. She doesn’t know what is going on either. Sometimes she is acting in a movie. Sometimes she is not. What are those people dressed up as rabbits doing?
MEPRIS (StudioCanal). A playwright (Michel Piccoli) prostitutes his wife (Brigitte Bardot) to an American film producer so that he can get a lucrative contract to re-write the screenplay of a movie being directed by Fritz Lang. He is then surprised she no longer loves him and holds him in contempt. Jean-Luc Goddard’s intriguing and much admired 1963 film is about filmmaking. It’s difficult (and the difficulty is the whole point) to separate fact and fiction and to know whether Bardot actually does love Piccoli.
49th PARALLEL (ITVX). Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were commissioned in 1940 to film an anti-Nazi propaganda movie, designed to bring the isolationist United States into World War II. They tell a story of five German sailors on the run across Canada. There’s a strong cast headed by Eric Portman, Leslie Howard, Niall McGuinness and Anton Walbrook. Laurence Olivier hams it up. The patriotic score is by Ralph Vaughan Williams. The film is of interest historically precisely because it is an example of British wartime propaganda.
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