Biographies are always problematic. Our thirst for the facts or the spurious in other people's lives never goes away. One of the characters in 101 year-old Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira's Eccentricities of a Blonde Haired Girl (adaptation of a short story by Eça de Queiros) quotes poet Fernando Pessoa - a man who willfully always blurred the boundaries:

If, after I die, they should want to write my biography,
There's nothing simpler.
I've just two dates - of my birth, and of my death.
In between the one thing and the other all the days are
mine.

Oliveira simply holds the camera's gaze on his subjects for a mere 64 minutes. So why is this so fascinating? The distillation of experience, perhaps.
Anthology have also just released in NYC

The bio-pic (though ascending far beyond the normal lows in that genre) of chanteur French royalty Serge Gainsbourgh goes in the opposite direction (as you'd expect from comic book artist turned director Joann Sfar). Many will cringe at this film (as they did of Serge in real life) - his simple, romantic little dittis, his insatiable appetite for women. But you can't fault Sfar's technical inspiration and execution. Nor Gainsbourgh's belief that art (he was painter/novelist/l'homme allamonde) can change if not politics then certainly states of mind. Not to mention the fact that he reminded France that their national anthem was once one of revolution not complacency.

Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky was one of the foreign films that the UK Film Council (a quango recently axed as part of the Conservatives austerity drive) supported through its prints and advertising subsidy. Distributer Soda Pictures have gone wide on this release with full poster campaign on the London Underground. Ken Russell affectionados (remember his outrageous BBC composer films) may not warm to Jan Kounen's film (based on Brit author Chris Greenhalgh's book) that only just keeps its head above bio-pic tide-mark. But the performances and production values are magnificent. 'In the know' music lovers will attend out of curiosity while for others Mr. Stravinsky will be a new aural experience. He too got in trouble with a national anthem when in 1940 he orchestrated the American one and was arrested in Boston. Plus ça change.

Coco might make an interesting, slightly perverse double-bill with Éric Rohmer's My Night with Maud (1969) - a film that for years has stuttered along in poor revival house prints. One still has to concentrate hard on Rohmer's cheeky intellectual exercise but the BFI's restoration (the great camera of Nestor Almendros in B/W) makes it so much easier. Knowing your Marx from your Pascal and Jansenism helps but talk about making religious philosophy sexy with the Maud of Françoise Fabian! They sure don't make date movies like that anymore. maybe Woody Allen will tackle John Locke: Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy ;)
The Sign of Rohmer (August 18-Sept 3,Walter Reade, New York)
Moral Tales is out on Artificial Eye DVD

And if this blog were to have a Top 10 list of all time (the only confession you'll ever get) then Visconti's The Leopard (1963) would certainly stand proud. It's been newly restored and while previous prints were a huge wonderful seashell on the mantlepiece, to see this restoration is like having the living organism inside. "The middle-classes don't want to destroy us, they want to take our place," says the Prince on the brink decade of Italy's unification. To not have seen for decades the cinematic detail of every doorway, every curtain waving in the wind "without the wind the air would be fettid", every hue of the Sicilian countryside, is not to have seen this film. It is quite simply a masterpiece of cinema.

One contemplated writing something of the first 100 days of the new UK 'coalition' government of Conservative and Liberal Democrat. But there just isn't much that's funny anymore. (The Lib Dems used to be the butt of many a joke but not anymore) On launching his new bike scheme in London Mayor Boris Johnson joked that it needed a Conservative to undertake a Communist policy. Go see Giuseppe Tornatore's Baarìa instead. It hasn't got great press this film and at 2.5 hours you'd think it would plummet into boredom at any moment. But it never does. "He may be a Communist but he's in a painting with saints," one character says of the frescoed brigands in the Sicilian church of Bagheria. For the great, still inventive, film composer Ennio Morriconi the film's "a work that can make time stand still". The Prince in Lampedusa's The Leopard, in Tornatore's words,"claimed that young men should leave Sicily before they turned 17 to avoid absorbing...the typical Sicilian flaws. So I had time to consume them all." From "the University in Via Gioaccino Guttuso 114" to the "the Roundabout di Palagonia...is only, all in all a few hundred metres. But if you walk them up and down for years, you could learn what the whole world will never be able to teach you."
The Age of Austerity Challenges Stonehenge
The Paolo Sorrentino Collection will soon be out on Artificial Eye DVD.

"There came a time, he realised, when the strangeness of everything made it increasingly difficult to realise the strangeness of anything."
James Hilton Lost Horizon