March 26, 2007
avenue montaigne
Since 1964, Claude Brasseur has appeared in about 100 films; he has played Mussolini, Maupassant, and an inspector (in the movie Dancing Machine). Sugarhigh! has seen exactly none of these films that passed between the slight roundelay of Avenue Montaigne and the slight serie noir crime film Band of Outsiders, 42 years earlier. In the former, he plays a one-time cabbie who has climbed to the top of society and now, near death, is selling of his world-class art collection. In the latter he plays a casual criminal who comes to a bad end. One of these might be the best movie ever made.
All movies are in the present, the always-unfolding present; seeing Brasseur enter the scene here, it is as if no time at all has passed since he departed the field outside the house of Odile's aunt. But it is stark to see a face age four decades without a sequence, or a slow dissolve; as shocking a jump-cut as anything Godard could have contrived.
10) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
9) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
8) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
7) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
6) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
5) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
4) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)