Digital Week – January 15

French director Jean Eustache’s 1973 masterpiece may be the greatest film his compatriots Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer or Jean-Luc Godard never made—its mammoth length (3 hours and 40 minutes) belies the simplicity of its subject and execution: it’s a look at a narcissistic young man’s relationships with his live-in lover and a new woman in his life. Although it’s nearly all talk, since it’s Eustache’s script—with supposedly no improvisation—it’s emotionally direct and honest. This is by far Jean-Pierre Leaud’s best performance, and Bernadette Lafont and Francoise Lebrun equal him as his eponymous lovers. The photography and editing are sublime, and the shattering ending reminds one of Ozu, which is high praise indeed. The B&W film looks stupendously sharp in UHD; extras comprise new interviews with Lebrun and filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin; archival interviews with Eustache, Leaud, Lafont and Lebrun; and a restoration featurette.

It starts with an ugly, CGI-drenched opening and ends more than two and a half hours later with the showstopper “Defying Gravity”—which is only the end of the first act of Steven Schwartz’s blockbuster Broadway musical. That means we have to sit through another two-plus hours next holiday season to finish this thing. So is it all worth it? Not really—it’s a mighty slog to get through, the songs are mainly negligible, the story isn’t as clever as it should be, and only Cynthia Erivo has the requisite vocal chops and acting prowess to make Elphaba soar into the stratosphere. Ariana Grande also has a powerhouse voice, but when she tries to act, she’s laughably inadequate. Further, Bowen Tang, Jeff Goldblum, and Michelle Yeoh are wincingly hammy, while Jon M. Chu’s direction consists of making things bigger, louder and more garish without settling on a consistent tone or style.

Sally Aitken’s heartwarming documentary is an intimate portrait of author Terry Masear, who diligently and lovingly rehabs hummingbirds out of her California home, taking in those that were orphaned or injured and meticulously nurses them back to health. Aitken’s camera follows Masear, who founded Los Angeles Hummingbird Rescue 20 years ago and wrote the book “Fastest Things on Wings” in 2016, and also provides stunning views of the birds themselves—as Maseur notes, hummingbirds flap their wings 50 times a second, something that seems impossible to contemplate even as Aitken records it.  

Prora, which was a huge resort complex on Germany’s Baltic Sea, was built but left unfinished by the Nazi regime, and Mat Rappaport’s informative and thoughtful documentary explores its postwar life: the East German government continued its construction, using the place for military operations as well as housing for conscientious objectors. Then there are the lasting implications of its history—through insightful interviews and on-location footage, Rappaport raises important questions exploring the dissection of tourism and politics. There’s an excellent hi-def transfer. 

One of Mozart’s early operas, a tragedy about a king and his two sons who are all in love with the same woman, comes off as stately and often static in director Satoshi Miyagi’s 2022 Berlin State Opera staging, despite Mozart’s often melodious music. The cast, led by Pene Pati, Ana Maria Labin, Angela Brower, Paul-Antoine Bénos-Djian, Sarah Aristidou and Ken Sugiyama, is impeccable, while the Les Musiciens du Louvre under conductor Marc Minkowski provide solid support. There’s first-rate hi-def video and audio.

Although the French title, HLM Pussy, gets right to the point—if too rudely for some, obviously— Nora El Hourch’s trenchant character study dramatizes how a close-knit group of teenage female friends becomes partially estranged when one calls out her brother’s best friend for sexual harassment. Bringing “MeToo” into a different arena, El Hourch finds space for sympathy and understanding as well as justified rage, and she has assembled a perfect cast of mostly unknown performers—I only recognized the elegant Berenice Bejo, who plays the mom of one of the teens—for a clear-eyed, truthful study that’s all the more remarkable for being El Hourch’s debut feature.