(no subject)
Dec. 6th, 2025 01:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI am home! with my own cats! and my own computer!! This is very exciting because I have spent most of the last two weeks traveling, including last Monday when I spent about 24 hours total stumbling through different airports getting rerouted onto different flights before finally getting to achieve my dearest wish at that point, Be Horizontal.
In the course of that extremely long day I watched two French movies on planes:
Au revoir là-haut/See You Up There (2017) was advertised on the In Flight Entertainment Page as a comedy. I wouldn't call it a comedy per se, although it is, definitely, satirical. It begins in the trenches of WWI -- well, actually it begins at the end, with mild-mannered ex-accountant Albert Maillard explaining to an officer of the law How He Got Into This Situation, which is via the trenches of WWI. In the very last days of the war, a Sociopathic Commanding Officer murdered some of his own men in order to trigger One Last Charge; during that attack, young, aristocratic, artistic, [extremely queer-coded] Edouard Péricourt saves Albert's life and almost immediately thereafter gets shot in the jaw, destroying the lower half of his face.
The war ends. Albert assumes responsibility for Edouard, and as a result finds himself sort of haplessly involved in an escalating amount of crime: Edouard wants his death faked for his family; and Edouard needs opium; and Edouard also, eventually, finds an outlet for his artistic talents in designing an elaborate con featuring jingoistic memorials as a brutal joke on the hypocrisy of the entire society that sent them to war. Edouard's other creative outlet is designing increasingly elaborate masks for himself. The masks are beautiful; I think the movie is worth seeing for the design work on the masks alone, and the physical and facial acting that Nahuel Pérez Biscayart is doing around and under them as Edouard.
Edouard has also adopted an orphan as his anger translator. Someone on letterboxd says this is my favorite movie about an artsy gay and their partner who admires them raising their adopted daughter together in solitude since “interview with the vampire".
Meanwhile, both Albert and the Sociopathic Commanding Officer have gotten increasingly involved with Edouard's grieving family, in a rapid-fire series of coincidences that tbh felt very 19th-century novel. I was not surprised to learn later that the movie was based on a 600-page book; I think there are a few too many things in it to quite fit into the pace of a movie. I would like to read the book now! Even though the end of the movie made me kind of mad. But I do keep thinking about it, messy and visually striking as it is. Here's the trailer:
La venue de l'avenir/Colors of Time (2025) (MISERABLE English title by comparison, wow) is a dual-timelines film: in the 1890s, young Adèle heads to Paris in search of her absentee mother gets involved in artistic circles and has a nice little coming-of-age story; in the present day, a set of distant cousins who are descended from Adèle inherit her house and its contents, which tell some of her story. I'll be honest, I thought from the description of this movie that there was going to be more Historical Detective Work, and there is a little bit of that, but mostly the cousins experience low-key yet meaningful family bonding through the experience. That said, there is one incredible sequence where the cousins decide to take some sort of shrooms to connect with their ancestors and hallucinate being at the Salon of 1873, Birth of Impressionism, which was funny both objectively ("I got hit on by Victor Hugo! :D!") and specifically to me because I'd just finished reading a nonfiction book about the Siege of Paris and the Birth of Impressionism. Hallucinating Art Critic and me both cheering wildly at the appearance of Berthe Morisot!
It's a sweet little film, in general. I do always think it's very funny when we have to justify the importance of our historical fictions by tying our protagonist to a Historical Famous Person, but again, because I'd just been reading about approximately this time period, I did not mind so much and I was pleasantly ready instead to be like "oh? her dad might be Nadar? I remember him! balloon guy*!" And I like that the present-day emphasis is not on, like, a grand romance or any particular great life change or even Inheriting Surprise Big Money; it's just, everyone's life is a little bit better because they made these new connections to people they might not otherwise have interacted with. Charming!
*better known for other work
And here's the trailer for this one:
In the course of that extremely long day I watched two French movies on planes:
Au revoir là-haut/See You Up There (2017) was advertised on the In Flight Entertainment Page as a comedy. I wouldn't call it a comedy per se, although it is, definitely, satirical. It begins in the trenches of WWI -- well, actually it begins at the end, with mild-mannered ex-accountant Albert Maillard explaining to an officer of the law How He Got Into This Situation, which is via the trenches of WWI. In the very last days of the war, a Sociopathic Commanding Officer murdered some of his own men in order to trigger One Last Charge; during that attack, young, aristocratic, artistic, [extremely queer-coded] Edouard Péricourt saves Albert's life and almost immediately thereafter gets shot in the jaw, destroying the lower half of his face.
The war ends. Albert assumes responsibility for Edouard, and as a result finds himself sort of haplessly involved in an escalating amount of crime: Edouard wants his death faked for his family; and Edouard needs opium; and Edouard also, eventually, finds an outlet for his artistic talents in designing an elaborate con featuring jingoistic memorials as a brutal joke on the hypocrisy of the entire society that sent them to war. Edouard's other creative outlet is designing increasingly elaborate masks for himself. The masks are beautiful; I think the movie is worth seeing for the design work on the masks alone, and the physical and facial acting that Nahuel Pérez Biscayart is doing around and under them as Edouard.
Edouard has also adopted an orphan as his anger translator. Someone on letterboxd says this is my favorite movie about an artsy gay and their partner who admires them raising their adopted daughter together in solitude since “interview with the vampire".
Meanwhile, both Albert and the Sociopathic Commanding Officer have gotten increasingly involved with Edouard's grieving family, in a rapid-fire series of coincidences that tbh felt very 19th-century novel. I was not surprised to learn later that the movie was based on a 600-page book; I think there are a few too many things in it to quite fit into the pace of a movie. I would like to read the book now! Even though the end of the movie made me kind of mad. But I do keep thinking about it, messy and visually striking as it is. Here's the trailer:
La venue de l'avenir/Colors of Time (2025) (MISERABLE English title by comparison, wow) is a dual-timelines film: in the 1890s, young Adèle heads to Paris in search of her absentee mother gets involved in artistic circles and has a nice little coming-of-age story; in the present day, a set of distant cousins who are descended from Adèle inherit her house and its contents, which tell some of her story. I'll be honest, I thought from the description of this movie that there was going to be more Historical Detective Work, and there is a little bit of that, but mostly the cousins experience low-key yet meaningful family bonding through the experience. That said, there is one incredible sequence where the cousins decide to take some sort of shrooms to connect with their ancestors and hallucinate being at the Salon of 1873, Birth of Impressionism, which was funny both objectively ("I got hit on by Victor Hugo! :D!") and specifically to me because I'd just finished reading a nonfiction book about the Siege of Paris and the Birth of Impressionism. Hallucinating Art Critic and me both cheering wildly at the appearance of Berthe Morisot!
It's a sweet little film, in general. I do always think it's very funny when we have to justify the importance of our historical fictions by tying our protagonist to a Historical Famous Person, but again, because I'd just been reading about approximately this time period, I did not mind so much and I was pleasantly ready instead to be like "oh? her dad might be Nadar? I remember him! balloon guy*!" And I like that the present-day emphasis is not on, like, a grand romance or any particular great life change or even Inheriting Surprise Big Money; it's just, everyone's life is a little bit better because they made these new connections to people they might not otherwise have interacted with. Charming!
*better known for other work
And here's the trailer for this one:
no subject
Date: 2025-12-06 08:07 pm (UTC)In any of the traditional ways that queer stories are failed, or a different one? The mask angle is appealing.
And I like that the present-day emphasis is not on, like, a grand romance or any particular great life change or even Inheriting Surprise Big Money; it's just, everyone's life is a little bit better because they made these new connections to people they might not otherwise have interacted with.
I am often ambivalent about the necessity of present-day frame stories, so, nice. I was not expecting the shrooms.
I am glad you are no longer in multiple airports!
no subject
Date: 2025-12-06 08:16 pm (UTC)THAT SAID I still really think you should watch it, I spent the whole film thinking that Edouard was designed in a lab for you in particular.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-06 08:24 pm (UTC)Dammit, I've seen that one in the Production Code! I was hoping it just fell narratively apart or something.
THAT SAID I still really think you should watch it, I spent the whole film thinking that Edouard was designed in a lab for you in particular.
So noted! I have actually heard of Nahuel Pérez Biscayart because of BPM (Beats per Minute) (120 battements par minute, 2017), although I have not seen the film; it is about ACT UP Paris, so any tragic endings would have more historical justification than Victoriana.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-12 09:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-12 10:07 pm (UTC)That'd be why I haven't yet seen it! I'll start with Au revoir là-haut and ignore the ending.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-09 11:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-12 09:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-07 10:45 am (UTC)I hope you enjoy being horizontal!
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Date: 2025-12-12 09:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-08 01:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-12 09:59 pm (UTC)