May 7 at 8pm | 5 Movies
TCM Imports has been showcasing the classics of international cinema since the launch of Turner Classic Movies in 1994. Author and film historian Alicia Malone, who took over hosting duties for the weekly series in 2019, has championed international films since she began reporting on and writing about cinema in her native Australia. And her first two books, "Backwards & In Heels" and "The Female Gaze," embraced women filmmakers from all over the world. As she noted in a 2020 “Screen Comment” interview, "Growing up in Australia, all films were foreign to me." This month Malone adds a new tome to her resume. "TCM Imports: Timeless Favorites and Hidden Gems of World Cinema" spotlights 52 films from all over the world, spanning decades, continents and cultures.
The five films showcased on the evening of Wednesday, May 7, have been plucked from the book and Malone will once again be your guide, discussing the filmmakers, the cultural and historical context of the films, and details behind the productions. "It’s very important to give context because it’s easy to look at films through our modern eyes," she explained in a 2020 “Film School Rejects” interview. It's important, in her words, "to give perspective, and to talk about the time in which it was made so we’re not trying to excuse anything."
In The Girls (1968), actress-turned-filmmaker Mai Zetterling uses a stage production of the classic Aristophanes play "Lysistrata" to explore the lives of women in contemporary Sweden. The leading roles in both the play and the film around it are played by Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson and Gunnel Lindblom, all veterans of Ingmar Bergman's theatrical productions and movies. But rather than offer a backstage drama, the themes in the play are in conversation with the lives of the three actresses and the film turns increasingly impressionistic and surreal with imaginative scenes that invite us into their perspectives. As Malone described it, Zetterling "wanted to show the men through the women's eyes" and created scenes that were "a projection or a fantasy or a memory all told through the eyes of women."
It was a financial disappointment (Zetterling herself called it "a resounding flop") and it was attacked by film critics in Sweden—overwhelmingly male—who derided the film's scathingly satirical portrait of men, either missing or willfully ignoring Zetterling's point. The film's commercial failure made it difficult to make another feature and though she remained active making documentaries (including a segment in Visions of Eight, 1973) and TV programs, she was unable to make another feature for nearly a decade. As is the case with so many visionary works, it took a few years for the world to catch up to The Girls. Simone de Beauvoir, writing in “Le Monde,” called it “the best movie ever made by a woman,” and in a 2012 poll, it was voted one of the 25 best Swedish films ever made.
When the esteemed French filmmaker René Clément made Purple Noon (1960), he was in a period of reinvention. Though his films had won several awards at the Cannes and Venice film festivals over the years, his reputation had taken a hit. François Truffaut, then a young film critic with “Cahier du Cinema,” lumped Clément among the filmmakers he attacked for an impersonal "tradition of quality" that he and his fellow young critics decried, and the attacks (and the changing times) damaged the filmmaker. With Purple Noon, based on Patricia Highsmith's "The Talented Mr. Ripley" (the first of now three screen versions), Clément drew from the energy of the French nouvelle vague, scripting the adaptation with Claude Chabrol and collaborator Paul Gégauff and putting cinematographer Henri Decaë (a veteran of Jean-Pierre Melville, Truffaut and Louis Malle's films) behind the camera. He shot the tale of jealousy, greed, and murder on location under the warm sun and azure skies of Rome and the Italian Mediterranean in the summer. He also cast rising young star Alain Delon, a handsome but largely untested romantic lead, in the role of Tom Ripley, an ambitious young American living it up in Italy on a vacation funded by spoiled, shallow scion Philippe Greenleaf, a bully who delights in making Tom his toady.
For the film's first murder scene, which takes place on a sailboat, a summer storm suddenly whipped up during filming and Clément quickly incorporated the natural drama to heighten the violence and intensity of Tom's act. The scene was improvised on the spot, with Decaë shooting it all from the deck as the boat rocked on choppy seas and Delon steered the craft while trying to get rid of the body. When the sailboat's boom swung around and knocked Delon into the water, Clément (directing from a second boat) kept rolling to capitalize on the accident, despite the peril it put Delon in. The result is startling and dynamic and immediate. Though Clément was a generation removed from the nouvelle vague, with Purple Noon he created a film as immediate and exciting as the young filmmakers who wrote him off as outdated. Along the way, he elevated Delon into international stardom.
The Vanishing (1988) turns on a question that, at least as posed by the seemingly mild-mannered father and chemistry teacher Raymond Lemorne (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu), has a terrifying answer. Can a man who saves a life in an act of heroism just as easily take a life? That's the starting point for the gripping and uneasily intimate thriller from Dutch filmmaker George Sluizer. Adapted from the novella "The Golden Egg" by Tim Krabbé, the film opens with a young couple, Rex (Gene Bervoets) and Saskia (Johanna ter Steege), on the road, a rocky romance cut short when Saskia is abducted by Raymond at a truck stop. For the next three years, the guilt-ridden Rex obsessively searches for the missing Saskia and Raymond has an idea for a new experiment.
Bervoets was a popular TV actor and Donnadieu a veteran actor who had appeared in an earlier film by Sluizer, but Johanna ter Steege was an unknown making her film debut. Spotted in a student theatrical production, she was cast in part because she resembled Sluizer's daughter, and she makes the sometimes-unstable romance with Bervoets' Rex palpable and alive, a relationship all the more believable because it is not perfect. Though she is on screen for less than 20 minutes, her presence makes a powerful impression on the audience and her absence drives the film. By that time, another question takes over in the film's startling third act: how far will you go to learn the truth? As Sluizer put it in an interview, "There is an urge in the human being to want to know so you can want to know, let's say, on a philosophical level, on an intellectual level, on an emotional level, on a fundamental human level. I think that's very important when she disappears and the film plays on those different kinds of wanting to know."
Melancholy, sensual, at once intimate and aloof, Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love (2000) is a slow dance of desire and disappointment between two neighbors (played by Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) in a crowded Hong Kong apartment building who suspect that their respective spouses are having an affair. It's 1962, an era that Wong brings to life with rich colors, elegant outfits, a dreamy mood and a soundtrack of romantic ballads in Cantonese and English.
Wong's films are often narratively elusive, made up of suggestions and slivers of scenes that dissolve into one another, and In the Mood for Love is no different. Production began with little more than an outline and his stars, both veterans of previous Wong productions, tried different approaches to the characters as they shot, reshot and improvised scenes. "We kind of found the character together," explained Cheung in an interview. "We were trying to experiment and do different things each time until we fine-tuned it and knew who she was." As Leung described it, "At first we have only little hints about the characters, the name of the character and the occupation, so I start from the exterior, start to get used to the costume of the sixties and the hair cream." At one point the actors did double duty to play each other's spouses, but the time to change make-up and costumes proved too time-consuming, and though other actors were eventually cast, the spouses are never seen on screen, a choice made by Wong in the editing room.
Shooting stretched on for 15 months. They were forced to wait on permits to shoot in Bangkok to stand in for 1960s Hong Kong exteriors, and production was periodically halted as the actors left to honor previous commitments. Editing took even longer as Wong carried on with reshoots while carving his feature out of hundreds of hours of footage. He barely completed it in time to debut at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, where it won two awards. Malone has called it "one of the most romantic—and most beautiful—films ever made."
Ikiru (1952), perhaps the most personal film from the great Akira Kurosawa, brings the program to an end. Kurosawa made his name around the world with his historical dramas and samurai action pictures, but with Ikiru, the director was intent on making a drama about an ordinary man in contemporary Japan. Takashi Shimura, a longtime Kurosawa collaborator (he starred opposite Toshirô Mifune in Drunken Angel in 1948 and played the leader of the Seven Samurai in 1954, among many others) stars as the widower, father and career bureaucrat who struggles after being diagnosed with an incurable illness until he finds a reason to go on. While Mifune remains Kurosawa's most dynamic and dominating actor, Shimura is arguably the beating heart of Kurosawa's cinema.
The English translation of the title is "To Live" and it is as much about life as it is about death, as we observe the bureaucrat's weary face and beaten-down presence reignite with purpose. It is also a portrait of Japan in the early 1950s, still rebuilding from the devastation of the war, the collapse of the family and the failure of the intransigent Japanese bureaucracy. "Modern Japan has perhaps never been so fully exposed (in both senses of the word) as in this film," wrote film historian Donald Richie.
The film placed first on the 1952 "Kinema Jumpo" Ten Best list and won a special prize at the Berlin Film Festival. "Ikiru has something both stagey and literary about it," Kurosawa opined in a later interview. "But then what I really like to do is just something like this. Take something not entirely cinematic, even literary—and then when you've finished it, you look at it, and it has become cinematic." Indeed, the final image of the film remains one of the most moving and sublime in all of cinema.
The lavishly illustrated "TCM Imports: Timeless Favorites and Hidden Gems of World Cinema" is available to purchase wherever books are sold.
