Delphine Seyrig in a scene from Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
classic films
Female-helmed and/or starring flicks
The Heartbreak Kid (1972, Elaine May, United States) Our classics this month are a quartet of female-helmed and or starring flicks. First up is a great dissection of male ego and impotence by director Elaine May, adapting a script by Neil Simon. Charles Grodin plays a newlywed on honeymoon with his low-class wife, played by a spectacularly unlovable Jeannie Berlin. Assailed by second thoughts about his marriage, he falls for Cybill Shepherd’s upwardly mobile blonde goddess and attempts to ingratiate himself to her and to her disapproving father (Eddie Albert). May’s inimitable way with comedy, finding the bruising punch in every punchline, is fully evident. She masterfully balances the comedy and horror of this situation, delineating each character’s motives without reducing them to stereotype. Her pessimist’s view of human nature goes hand in hand with a love 18
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of people in all their idiosyncrasies and idiocies. (Streaming on rarefilmm.) Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975, Chantal Akerman, Belgium/France) For the nearly three-and-a-half hour runtime of Chantal Akerman’s chilling masterpiece, we are in the company of housewife Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig) as she cooks, cleans, mothers her son, and turns tricks to make ends meet. She adheres to a routine that, over the course of several days, begins to break down. No other movie milks quite the same level of discomfort out of overcooked food or a dropped utensil. The psychological disruptions are subtle yet epochal, driving Dielman to a desperate and dehumanizing climactic act. This isn’t a movie you watch so much as you feel in your bones. It attunes you to the ways in which, so
often, life is guided and shaped by minutiae. How the smallest divergence from the expected, from the normal, can send you reeling into the abyss. (Streaming on Criterion Channel.) Point Break (1991, Kathryn Bigelow, United States/Japan) In the more-than-adept hands of Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker), this gloriously pulpy thriller about an FBI agent (Keanu Reeves) infiltrating a gang of bank-robbing surfers takes on a state-of-the-times profundity. Not for nothing do the thieves don masks of ex-presidents (Nixon, Carter, Reagan) whenever they hit a financial institution, grabbing some quick cash so they can concentrate on riding waves and attaining pot-addled enlightenment. The gang’s ringC O N T I N U E D O N PA G E
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