Green’s style, wide-eyed and mannered to a fault, is always a tonic. His movies feel like school plays that gained sentience and fled the stage. Most dialog is delivered directly to camera, the jokes are broad and ludicrous, the performances are all identically calibrated, there are breaks for music and performance, good always triumphs, after a fashion, and there’s usually a donkey. Green clearly had a lot of fun dreaming up the devil’s parlors and wardrobe, and his own version of a black mass, which is a hoot. His renaissance-inflected classicism always meshes hilariously with his wry sense of humor and this is no different, simply presenting the impossible sights and deeds of his morality play with the same bemused grin. It’s one of the most rewarding outlooks in the modern cinema, and its ending (which looks to be influenced by Marcel Carné’s “La merveilleuse visite”) though sad on paper, is nevertheless uplifting and lovely.
Less uplifting, though no less lovely, is the latest from Philippe Garrel. Garrel’s like a seasoned singer-songwriter: if you’re still buying his albums it’s because you like how he sings and plays, and you like his wistful worldview. He and Jean-Luc Godard are the last of the French New Wave filmmakers still alive and directing, and their methods are practically anathema. Godard is still reinventing the wheel and Garrel is still just trying to figure out how the heart works.
“The Salt of Tears” is deceptively simple in outline: a young man (Logann Antuofermo) falls in love with three women, one right after the other, as he tries to figure out what the rest of his life is going to be. There’s not much else to the film from a narrative standpoint, but the movie is laced with brutal detail about our emotional whims and the consequences of young lover’s actions. Written with the legend Jean-Claude Carrière, who’s been helping Garrel craft his movies for the last half decade, “The Salt of Tears” builds to a series of crushing realizations and unwanted shocks. Garrel’s been finding the ugly truths about how we comport ourselves with the people we love and/or take for granted for a long time, and this is one of his most honestly upsetting works, even with the requisite dance break (unlike Godard, he never got sick of those).
As “The Salt of Tears” articulates, it hurts to say goodbye to something that feels like it never properly happened. There were no subway rides in which to think about these movies, no hugs from friends you won’t see in some cases for a full year. Those goodbyes happened without our permission. They sometimes do. I would have loved to be able to sit over coffee and talk to some other people about the way Gianfranco Rosi’s beautiful documentary “Notturno” and Sarah Friedland’s haunting short “Drills” examine violence against children in such fascinatingly singular ways. I would have liked to have seen Ben Rivers’ “Look Then Below” on the big screen, to see the restorations of William Klein’s marvelous “Muhammad Ali, The Greatest,” and Wojciech Has’ hallucinatory “The Hourglass Sanatorium” with an audience. Cinema has been there for us in a big way while we’re trapped, and I’m so grateful I was able to focus on this incredible line-up for the last few weeks, but part of me never got over the absences. Of people, of surroundings, of the full darkness of a theatre, of the way things used to be. Some day this will end.
