Postcards from the South

A contributor to the Guardian, the New Inquiry, and n+1, Chew-Bose is also the author of Too Much and Not the Mood, a 2017 essay collection that the New Yorker’s Alexandra Schwartz has called “a warmly considered meld of criticism and memoir, a self-portrait of the writer as intrepid mental wanderer.” You’ll want to read the descriptions Chew-Bose has written for the films she’s coprogrammed for the series, which opens with five short films, “dispatches from the south of France, sketches of the region’s way of life, its bounty of clear blue, its hospitable charms, but also, its fabricated finish. Revelry and escapism come at a cost. Boredom washes up. The gardens are fenced in. The beaches are overcrowded.”

Next week brings three young women whiling away a summer in a beachside house in Jacques Rozier’s Near Orouët (1971), which “both celebrates and ironizes the escapist urge,” as Beatrice Loayza wrote last year for Film Comment. “Against a gray coastal backdrop, accented by extra-long shots of races across the sand and bird’s-eye views capturing the girls’ mindless lazing, the characters seem to fall under a dissociative spell.”

The dynamics of father-daughter relationships drive both Bonjour Tristesse and Mia Hansen-Løve’s Father of My Children (2009), starring Louis-Do de Lencquesaing as an independent film producer whose financial burdens become insurmountable. Father of My Children is “a tale of cinema, a story about the agonies of trying to work outside the cinematic mainstream (even in France!),” writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. “Yet what makes the movie so affecting is that it’s also a love story about a family.”

In Angela Schanelec’s Marseille (2004), Sophie (Maren Eggert), a photographer in Berlin, and Zelda (Emily Atef), a friend in the French coastal city, swap apartments. “My prevailing sensation when first encountering Marseille was the pleasurable feeling of being within a known, and liked, artistic space,” writes Andrew Tracy for Reverse Shot. “As the film entered its second half, it was thus progressively more unnerving to realize just how gaping Schanelec’s ellipses were becoming—how a clearly articulated and readable working method was, without at all changing its manner, becoming progressively more mysterious.”

April 15 will offer Cary Grant and Grace Kelly on the Riviera in 1955. “The panoramic allure of To Catch a Thief—its blatant reveling in the beauty of lush settings and glamorous movie stars—has often led critics to downgrade its place in Alfred Hitchcock’s oeuvre,” writes Fernando F. Croce for Slant. “Indeed, the director himself encouraged a view of it as little more than a frothy diversion: A ‘vacation movie,’ he told an interviewer, yet from the very beginning (a shock-cut from a touristic pamphlet on a display window to a woman shrieking into the camera) it’s clear that the Master has packed his obsessions along with his luggage.”

The series naturally wraps with Bonjour Tristesse, Chew-Bose’s reinterpretation of the 1954 novel by Françoise Sagan first adapted by Otto Preminger in 1958. When the new film premiered in Toronto, Mark Olsen spoke with Chew-Bose for the Los Angeles Times, noting that she “clearly has a deep, passionate engagement with the art and craft of making movies.”

Lily McInerny plays Cécile, an eighteen-year-old vacationing with her father (Claes Bang) when the arrival of a family friend (Chloë Sevigny) disrupts a delicate balance. “I actually do think that the themes that I have continued to be interested in as a reader and a writer and a moviegoer I've tried to put into this film,” says Chew-Bose, “be it women's interiority, women's influence on each other, a woman alone in a room and what does that look like and feel like, fathers and daughters . . . I actually think that close readers might feel like this is part of the language that I've always written in, and now I just have had this incredible privilege to do it in a movie.”