Agnès Varda’s charming DAGUERREOTYPES finally gets its official U.S. theatrical release this month at the Maysles Cinema
DAGUERREOTYPES (Agnès Varda, 1975)
Maysles Institute
343 Malcolm X Blvd. between 127th & 128th Sts.
December 12-18, 7:30
212-582-6050
www.mayslesinstitute.org
Livia Bloom’s “Documentary in Bloom” series at the Maysles Cinema usually introduces new nonfiction films, but it has something a little different in store for December: the U.S. theatrical release of a thirty-six-year-old French work. It’s hard to believe that Daguerreotypes, Agnès Varda’s absolutely charming look at her longtime Parisian community, has never had a theatrical run in America, so it is exciting that her wonderful little tale is finally being shown on the big screen. In Daguerreotypes, Varda, who has made such New Wave classics as Cléo de 5 à 7 and Le Bonheur as well as such seminal personal documentaries as The Gleaners and I and The Beaches of Agnès, turns her camera on the people she and husband Jacques Demy lived with along the Rue Daguerre in Paris’s 14th arrondissement. Varda, who also narrates the seventy-five-minute film, primarily stands in the background while capturing local shopkeepers talking about their businesses and how they met their spouses as customers stop by, picking up bread, meat, perfume, and other items. Varda uses a goofy, low-rent magic show as a centerpiece, with many of the characters attending this major cultural event; the magician references the magic of both life and cinema itself, with Varda titling the film not only after the street where she lives but also directly evoking the revolutionary photographic process developed by Louis Daguerre in the 1820s and ’30s. Daguerreotypes will surely have a different impact now than it did back in the mid-1970s, depicting a time that already felt like the past but now feels like a long-forgotten era, when neighbors knew one another and lived as a tight-knit community. The film will be proceeded by the 1965 short Elsa la Rose, a twenty-minute documentary directed by Varda and Raymond Zanchi and narrated by Michel Piccoli that explores the loving relationship between French writers and communists Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet.
We really wanted to like Bad Santa a lot more than we did. Terry Zwigoff, who brought us the delightful Crumb (1994) and the terrific Ghost World (2000), reaches for the bottom of the toilet in this foul-mouthed, dingy, and dirty holiday tale of a drunk, debauched Santa (Billy Bob Thornton) and his curse-spewing sidekick elf (Tony Cox) who go to different malls each year and rob them after Santa mistreats the kids who line up to ask for presents. Hey, we love our comedy as low grade as the next person, but we have to admit it bothered us when Thornton let loose with a torrent of filthy language in front of kid actors. The story was devised by executive producers Joel and Ethan Coen, who had good intentions that go awry in the end. Bernie Mac, Lauren Graham, and especially John Ritter add fun support. And although Brett Kelly as the Kid, Norman Thurman, is funny at first, eventually the maudlin aspects of his developing relationship with Santa get overplayed and bring the movie down a few notches. Bad Santa is screening just past midnight Friday and Saturday at the Nitehawk Cinema in Williamsburg, where a few drinks before going in should help a whole lot.
In a very poor South American village, four men are needed to transport two truckloads of nitroglycerin to the scene of an industrial accident. The men jump at the chance to risk their lives for a small amount of cash because they have nothing else in their pitiful lives. Yves Montand stars in this endlessly tense, harrowing film that won the Golden Bear in Berlin, the BAFTA in England, and the Grand Prize at Cannes. The cast also includes Charles Vanet, Peter van Eyck, Folco Lulli, and Véra Clouzot, the wife of director Henri-Georges Clouzot (Les Diaboliques, Les Espions). Based on the novel by Georges Arnaud, The Wages of Fear was remade as Sorcerer by William Friedkin in 1977, starring Roy Scheider — a good film, but not nearly the cinematic experience the original still is. Clouzot’s back-and-white classic, a masterpiece of suspense that will literally have you on the edge of your seat, ready to explode at any moment, is being shown December 9-22 at Film Forum in a new 35mm that should make it even more terrifying. For more Clouzot, see 
