Category: Non-English Film

After stealing a car and shooting a policeman to death, young French thug Jean-Paul Belmondo hides out in the apartment of his American girlfriend Jean Seberg. Despite his artifice and unappealing character, Seberg seems like she loves him, or at least thinks she could fall in love with him, but she doesn’t know him, doesn’t know what he’s capable of, or how he treats women. One small example: before hiding out with her, he visited another girlfriend and stole money from her purse after already borrowing money from her. Seberg is absolutely beautiful in this film though. She shines on screen and I’m definitely going to be adding more of her work to my List.

Starting at her breakup with another man, this tells the story of literary translator Monica Vitti’s months long relationship with Alain Delon, her mother’s stockbroker. I mostly go into films for the stories they tell and there just isn’t much story here. It’s more a poetic mix of images and moments from a short period in the woman’s life. It also includes a bit of unexpected off-putting blackface and ugly colonist views during one sequence visiting her neighbor. I’ll try the rest of Antonioni’s trilogy at some point, but it’s possible it’s just not my sort of thing.

Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann are former violinists living together on a farm, beginning to experience the effects of civil war moving towards their remote island. It’s a surreal, abstract look at war and what it does to people. There’s no obvious delineation between the two sides nor any commentary on any of the reasons they are fighting. Even still, there can be no bystanders; everyone is forced to choose a side. It pulls at whatever connecting threads that lie between two people until there is nothing left and everything is laid bare.  

This version of the Santa Claus myth starts with St. Nick as an orphaned Finnish child whose earliest forays into gift giving began as a way to thank the various families who cared for him after his parents died. It’s a slightly dark tale that offers some clever takes on well-known features of the mythology. Unfortunately the only versions of this film that I had available to me were all dubbed into English from the original Finnish. More so than even the average dubbed film, much felt lost in the telling and some of the characters, particularly Nicholas, come off as deranged at times. I probably won’t revisit this one unless I can locate a subtitled copy. 

I had no idea what I was getting into when I decided to watch this film, just that it was highly recommended on many sites of the years. After watching it, I still am somewhat beyond words as to what to say about it. On the day of his daughter’s fourth birthday, Choi Min-sik is kidnapped and held by unknown captors for 15 years. Upon his sudden release, he’s determined to solve the mystery of his kidnapping. The film is a brutal and spell-binding tale of revenge and builds on my appreciation for Korean cinema.