Boris Karloff, The Mask of Fu Manchu, Charles Brabin, 1942
Bernard Verley, Love in the Afternoon, Eric Rohmer, 1972
The occasion of the ongoing and entirely splendid Film Society of Lincoln Center Eric Rohmer retrospective inspires me to muse, a little bit, on how sort of interesting it is that a filmmaker who chose one half of his pseudonym in homage to the creator of Fu Manchu would betray very little of that writer's influence in his own work. Or would he? Actually, not so much. At The Daily Notebook.
This retro, incidentally, affords me the opportunity to plug in the scant holes in my experience of the great filmmaker's oeuvre; the other night My Lovely Wife and I delighted in 1993's The Tree, The Mayor, and the Mediatheque, an extremely droll political parable featuring a fantastic complement of quintessentially Rohmerean deliciously self-important and self-deluding characters, including Pascal Greggory as the very well-meaning but almost impossibly condescending title mayor, Fabrice Luchini as a truculent shoolteacher who becomes very exercised about the tree that the titular mediatheque threatens to uproot, and most hilariously, Arielle Dombasle as the mayor's lover, a cheerful chatty whack job novelist. The characterization plays like such a direct continuation of Dombasle's clueless character from Rohmer's Pauline at the Beach that I had to check and make sure they didn't share the same name—they don't. One of this character's best bits is when she yammers on to the mayor about the etymological origins of the word "snob," which is the same in French as it is in English: it derives, she says, from the Latin phrase "sine nobilitate," meaning "without nobility," which of course, she flatters her lover, he himself cannot be. Her character being who she is, she is of course citing a discredited notion about the word, but she does it with all the confidence at her command, which is not a little bit. This made me laugh for a number of reasons, one of them, I have to admit, being some intimations of snobbery and quasi-noble origins having been directed my way recently. But I digress. The film played its final screening earlier this week, and I do hope it comes around again, maybe on video, as it's really a stitch.
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