The problem with seeing every film that one wants to see, the moment they come out, is that when the film release schedule hits a dry spell, as now, one really is out of options. I've already seen There Will Be Blood and Juno twice, and Be Kind Rewind and Cloverfield are still a week away. These are desperate times.
This week I hit up the Preminger retrospective at Film Forum. The movie I saw, Saint Joan, is held by no one to be among Preminger's best work. It is an ill-conceived adaptation of Bernard Shaw's play, and like many stage-to-screen productions, does not know where to proceed, and is framed awkwardly. I hesitate to make a sweeping judgment on Preminger's ouevre without having seen very many of his films, but aside from Laura, I have not liked what I have seen. More damningly, I think, the casting of Jean Seberg here (in Saint Joan) is a debacle. She cannot deliver the dialogue at all. While Jean Seberg is astonishingly good-looking, her acting is distractingly bad. Apropos another Preminger/Seberg film, Bonjour Tristesse, one is forced to read Truffaut's remark that it is "Preminger's love poem to Seberg," as "he must have been fucking her." Which, whether it is true or not, is basically the only excuse for the shoddy Saint Joan.
And I ponder aloud, is there any justification for our "revisiting" Preminger? As a corollary to the oft-asked "Is nothing sacred?", we might propose an alternate, "Is nothing assuredly and definitively hacky?" Must we constantly revive such second rate bodies of work? Preminger=a director whose talent I am willing to leave as a question settled in the negative.
Is Persepolis the only game in town this week, then?
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