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...Gabonese who changed my money at the bank (Union Monetaire du Afrique Centrale--a relic of the French colonial administration) laughed as told me the story. It seems that nobody in Port Gentil really cares about the central government of Gabon: Port Gentil is in effect an island at the mouth of southern Gabon's largest river. No highway or railroad connects it with the rest of Gabon and it's pretty much self-sufficient. Logs comes down the river to Port Gentil's sawmills, oil is beginning to be pumped from under Port Gentil, and ships come to take...
...peculiarities of his personality and situation, particularities of his personality and situation, particularly his brutality familial resentments and rustic simplicity; given the opportunity, he would just as easily have joined the resistance. Two other recent films continue this dialogue on the occupation. Michel Mitrani's Black Thursday (Les Gutchets du Louvre) and Michel Drach's Les Violons du Bal. Focusing their attention on the deportation of French Jewry, these directors too explore the occupation in relation to individual experiences, providing a perspective complimentary to Malle...
...VIOLONS DU BAL, on the other hand, while it presents the occupation as a personal experience, attempts to go beyond the purely accidental and individual in linking its concerns with the wider questions posed by Ophuls. Its with the wider questions posed by Ophuls. Its protagonist. Michel (Jean-Louis Trintignant), is shooting a film on his childhood experiences as a Jew during the occupation. The present in which the film is being shot is in black and white; the past it depicts, in lush, slow paced color sequences. All the actors in Michel's film are exquisitely beautiful, particularly...
...resistance to Vichy. Nevertheless, though his understanding of this connection is unsatisfying, Drach has found an effective formal means--the intercutting of color and black-and-white sequences--of handling the difficulties involved in recreating personal experiences of the occupation without lapsing into solipsism and emotional overkill. Les Violons du Bal asks the right questions; while it never fully answers them, it is nevertheless a more penetrating portrait of the occupation than Black Thursday, despite all the latter's historical detail...
...challenge. The progeny spawned by The Sorrow and the Pity have not yet begun to exhaust the avenues of investigation it opened. Bogging down in the confused psyches of its characters and the predictable suspense of its plot, Black Thursday obscures more than it illuminates. Les Violons du Bal, while far more interesting cinematically, does little more than delineate fruitful questions and tentative solutions...