Director Krzyszt Kieslowski decided to make three movies, one for each of the three colors of the French flag—blue, white, and red—and for each of the three basic ideas of France’s national motto—liberty, equality, and fraternity.  To drive the point home, he titled them Three Colors: Blue, Three Colors: White, and Three Colors: Red.  If the three movies were any good, this organizing scheme would be fine, but as it is, the whole thing just seems like a gimmick.

The first one is Blue. It’s about this woman Julie (Juliette Binoche), who turns her back on the world after a tragic accident. And that would be fine, except the camera keeps following her around, forcing us to be with her. I don’t begrudge anyone a little time to be depressed and grieve, but let her do it alone. Why do we have to be there? Of course, the movie wants us to think that all the strange things she does are evidence of a profound, suffering soul, thereby justifying all the screen time she gets. But I kept wishing the camera would follow someone else around for a while.

The next movie is White.  In that one there is this guy Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski), who is a real loser. It is not just that he is impotent, for which reason his wife, Dominique (Julie Delpy), divorces him. He acts like a worm. Because he keeps stalking Dominique, she finally has to drive him out of France.

Back in Poland, he inexplicably changes from being a loser into an entrepreneur, and becomes quite rich. But he is still small in spirit, because he still holds a grudge against his ex-wife. He leaves everything to her in his will, fakes his death, and fakes evidence to make it look as though she murdered him for the inheritance, resulting in her being sent to prison. But just before the police come to arrest her, he shows up in her bed, and they have sex. It must have been pretty good sex too, because when he goes to the prison and looks at her with binoculars behind the bars, she signals that she still loves him and wishes they were still married. And then he cries.

And people wonder why so many Americans hate foreign films.

Anyway, Red, the third film of this trilogy, is the best of the lot, but that is not saying much. Blue was irritating and White was dumb, but Red was sort of pleasant to watch. There seems to be some business about parallel lives, fate, and precognition, but to what end I do not know. Some people like the idea that everything that happens is destined to happen, and so I guess a movie like this will make them feel good.

Fortunately, there are only three colors in the French flag.

There seems to be a consensus in Wild Strawberries that Isak (Victor Sjöström) is lonely and isolated because he is cold and aloof. Actually, he does not seem so bad. He is friendly enough with other people, and he appears to be content with his relatively solitary existence. Anyway, Sara (Bibi Andersson), the woman he loved when he was young, married his brother, and somehow that was Isak’s fault, because he was cold and aloof. And Karin (Gertrud Fridh), the woman he ended up being married to, cuckolded him, but that was also Isak’s fault, because he was cold and aloof. He visits his mother, who is cold and aloof. His son Evald is cold and aloof.

I suppose the point is that if Isak’s mother had been warm and friendly, then she would have raised him to be warm and friendly, and then Sara would have married him and they would have lived happily ever after. Or Karin would have been faithful to him and they would have lived happily ever after. And they would have raised their son Evald to be warm and friendly, so that he and his wife Marianne (Ingrid Thulin) could have lived happily ever after. And being warm and friendly, Evald would have been happy to hear that Marianne was pregnant, so that they would have a child of their own, whom they could raise to be warm and friendly.

Having seen the error of his ways, Isak decides that he will henceforth become warm and friendly. Better late than never. So, he asks Agda (Jullan Kindahl), his maid of forty years, if she would like to be on a first-name basis. She rebuffs him.

The title character of Pépé le Moko, played by Jean Gabin, is a gangster from Paris who manages to elude the French authorities by hiding out in the Casbah, a tortuous citadel in Algiers.  His nemesis is Inspector Slimane (Lucas Gridoux), who bides his time waiting for Pépé to leave the Casbah so that he can be arrested.  Gaby (Mireille Balin) is the mistress of a rich businessman.  She and some friends visit the Casbah, during which she meets Pépé.  They fall in love, and so much so that Pépé can no longer stand being cooped up in the Casbah, which leads to him to leave so he can be with her all the time, giving Slimane the chance he has been waiting for.

You can tell when a movie is trying to impose an attitude on you, but it just doesn’t take. We are obviously supposed to regard Pépé as a charming rogue, but he is rude and inconsiderate. We are supposed to feel sorry for Inès (Line Noro), who truly loves him, but it is hard to care about a woman who will allow a man to treat her like dirt.

We are supposed to believe that Pépé and Gaby truly love each other, but I could not begin to swallow that one. Though Pépé appears to be about thirty years old, and supposedly has had his way with countless women, yet we are asked to believe he would fall madly in love with Gaby at first sight, acting as if he had the emotional maturity of an adolescent half his age. And she is a hard boiled, gold digging mistress of an older man, so true love at first sight does not suit her very well either.

We are not supposed to like Slimane, but I kept pulling for him to catch Pépé and put him in prison as he deserves. But nothing so mundane. When Pépé realizes he cannot have the woman he loves, he carves himself up with a knife. Oh well, at least the bad guy died in the end.

Andrzej and Krystyna are married and sick of each other.  They pick up a hitchhiker and end up offering to take him sailing without bothering to find out what his name is.  But his name really does not matter. What matters is that he has a knife.

According to Chekhov, if you make people aware of a gun early on in a story, sooner or later someone in the story will have to shoot the gun. If the gun is not going to be fired, it should not be in the story. Now, knives are more common than guns, and are used for mundane purposes, such as cutting the meat on one’s plate, so the rule that applies to guns cannot automatically be applied to knives. Unless, that is, it is a wicked-looking, gravity-propelled, telescoping knife with a four-inch, locking blade. When you put a knife like that in a story, then Chekhov’s law applies to that weapon as well, and it is required that someone get cut with it.

But no one does. Not only is this knife referred to in the title, but it is introduced early on and emphasized again and again. The tension is built up as the knife is used to play a dangerous game of stabbing between the fingers of a spread out hand. It is used again when it is several times thrown across the cabin and into the wall. And it is used to cut the halyard when the sailboat runs aground. This would be like having a gun in a movie that has the word “gun” in its title, with people showing off their marksmanship or using it for some ordinary practical end. It would not satisfy our need to see the gun used for a more deadly purpose, just as these various employments of the knife do not satisfy our expectation that someone will be stabbed with it. But no one is.

Finally, Andrzej takes the young man’s knife and throws it in the water. The idea is that the young man was very fond of his knife, and Andrzej threw it in the water out of spite. But in that case, the object might just as well have been a harmonica that the young man was fond of. As it is, the fact that no one got stabbed after all the emphasis placed on the knife leaves us disappointed, especially since we put up with a lot of boring nonsense waiting for something to happen. Roman Polanski, who directed this movie, must have eventually figured this out and tried to make amends by having Jack Nicholson get his nose sliced in Chinatown.

Mon oncle d’Amérique contains three elements: a neurological/psychological lecture, a melodrama of three intersecting lives, and scenes from black and white French movies. Presumably, these elements are supposed to add up to an artistic unity, but they work against each other instead, so that the net result is irritating. Especially confusing is the way the backgrounds of the three major characters are presented as if someone is hurriedly reading their dossiers.

If the entire film were simply a discussion on neurology and psychology, it might have been interesting. If it were just a melodrama, it might have been enjoyable. But the combination of the two creates the feeling that we are being talked down to. Over and over we are told that our conscious mind thinks it has reasons for what it does, but we are duped by our unconscious. No doubt, that is sometimes the case. But intercut with the melodrama, this lecture condescendingly suggests that we would not be able to understand these people and what they do without the benefit of the lecture.

References to American uncles are reminders that we live lives of illusion, since people express doubts about these uncles. The gratuitous scenes from old movies presumably are supposed to reinforce this notion of the illusory conscious mind.

The movie as a whole is less than the sum of its parts.

The title character of Man of Flowers is Charles (Norman Kaye), who saw his mother naked when he was a little boy, and has been obsessed with his mother and naked women ever since. He pays a psychiatrist to listen to him talk about his mother, and he pays a woman named Lisa (Alyson Best) to take off her clothes the way his mother did, giving Paul Cox, the director, an excuse to film some full frontal nudity. In between, Charles writes letters to his dead mother, addressed to himself, and goes around looking for statues of naked women to feel up.

But I guess that was not enough for Cox, so he gave Lisa a girlfriend, who is a lesbian, and they have sex together, and we get to watch. But Charles wants to watch too, so he pays them for the privilege. And that was not enough for Cox, so when Charles goes to look at the art of some guy named David (Chris Haywood), we get to see David with a naked woman. And then when Charles kills David so he can have Lisa for himself (just to watch, not to touch), he has a sculptor disguise David’s corpse as a statue. A naked statue, of course.

Now, lest we get the idea that Charles is a pervert (or that Cox is a pervert for wanting to make a movie like this), we have Lisa’s assurance that Charles is a kind, sensitive, sweet man. And then Cox wraps the whole seedy tale up in a lot of art: we have the organ that Charles plays for the church, we have operatic music unrelentingly going on in the background, we have sculpture and paintings, we have arrangements of flowers, and we have an art class, where a woman poses nude.  All this gives the movie class.

In other words, Cox really put some lipstick on this pig.

Apparently, the movie Black Girl is supposed to show us how black Africans are mistreated by white French people. The movie begins in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, where Diouana, a black woman, is desperate for work. She has doors slammed in her face, and finally is told to sit on a particular corner and wait for someone to come by who wants a maid. Day after day, she and a lot of other desperate women sit and wait to be hired.

Along comes “Madame,” a white French woman looking for a governess. She selects Diouana, presumably because she is the only woman who does not crowd around her trying to get the job. After taking care of the children for a while, Diouana agrees to go to France with Madame and “Monsieur.” Though Madame makes Diouana a lot of promises about how nice it will be for her in France, when they get there, Diouana discovers that she is expected to be a maid and a cook as well as a governess. As a result, she never gets to see France. In fact, she never even gets to leave the apartment. She feels like a slave. Furthermore, Madame is very demanding, and always complaining that Diouana is lazy. Granted, this is not a great job, but it is a job. It’s better than the desperate struggle she endured trying to find work in Dakar.

After what appears to be several months, the situation has deteriorated to the point that Diouana begins acting insolent, and she refuses to work out of resentment for the way she is being treated. Monsieur, who seems much nicer than Madame, has apparently been holding her wages for her, which amount to twenty thousand francs.

It is at this point that the clash of cultures really leaves me bewildered. I don’t know what twenty thousand francs was worth in 1966, but it sounds like a fair amount of money, presumably enough for Diouana to book passage back to Dakar, with enough left over to cushion herself until she finds work with a nicer family.  If that is not quite enough money for that purpose, she could just keep working for Madame and Monsieur until she does save enough.  But no. She commits suicide by opening up her veins.

Monsieur tries to do the right thing by returning Diouana’s belongings to her mother, along with the wages she earned. But her mother, whom we know to be desperate for money, refuses to take it. I guess it has something to do with pride, but after all, Diouana earned it, so what’s the big deal?

In other words, while I agree that Madame was not a nice person to work for, I just don’t see that Diouana’s situation was so bad that she had to give up and take her own life. I would have just taken the wages and split.

What a lovefest! Although it is set in the middle of World War I, La Grande Illusion shows everyone getting along fabulously. A German and a French officer regard their class as more important than their nationality, the German being very sad when he has to shoot the Frenchman. A Christian and a Jewish officer become pals and celebrate Christmas together, at a time when anti-Semitism was quite common. A German widow protects two French officers who have escaped, falling in love with one of them. They plan to get married after the war. When the two escapees make it over the Swiss border just as the Germans arrive, the Germans are relieved that they do not have to shoot them.

In the face of all this brotherhood-of-man stuff, we are forced to conclude that the whole war was just some big misunderstanding among friends.

Some critics say The Conformist is an important, thought-provoking film. I guess they are right, because it provoked me to think about a question that has bothered me for some time: Why do I keep watching these weird foreign films just because critics tell me they are important and thought provoking? As is typical for a weird foreign film, there is a lot of decadent sex. For example, the protagonist figures his half-brother is giving their mother morphine and having sex with her, so he has a fellow fascist slap him around. And by George, that is the last we hear about that! I guess this is what foreign directors call “character development.” If so, there is plenty more character development in this movie.

Anyway, as the title indicates, the protagonist just wants to conform and be like everyone else. So I guess he figures a good way to conform is by being an assassin. And to have more character-developing sex.

In Hiroshima Mon Amour, Elle (Emmanuelle Riva) is a French actress on location in Hiroshima, where she meets Lui (Eiji Okada), a Japanese architect. She is married with children, and he is married too, but they have sex anyway, because they both cheat on their spouses on a regular basis. After a single night, they fall madly in love with each other, convinced that the sex they had was deep and meaningful, so deep and meaningful, in fact, that when they cheat on their respective spouses with other paramours in the future, as they have every intention of so doing, they think that it will never be as good as what they have with each other right now. Of course, if they were free to marry, they would probably be cheating on each other in a couple years too, but that either does not seem to occur to them, or it occurs to them, but they don’t care, because they are the kind of people who think they are entitled to cheat, because it is so deep and meaningful when they do.

Although the movie is set in Hiroshima, where reference is naturally made to the atom bomb, this proves to be nothing more than a way of providing an excuse for Elle to talk about what she was doing in France when the bomb went off. From there she eventually tells about how she loved a German soldier, who was killed by a sniper, and how she was ostracized for having sex with him, causing her to have a nervous breakdown. She thinks that German soldier was the great love of her life, but given the kind of woman she is, we know that she would have been cheating on him in no time.

Since the movie is set in Hiroshima, and since Lui is a Japanese citizen, you might think Elle’s story about how she suffered so much during the war would be matched by a story from Lui about his experience during that period. Nope. All we get is that he was in the army. Well, after all, this is a French movie and not a Japanese movie, so it is only the French experience that the movie deems worthy of consideration.

Not that it matters, because these two people and their exaggerated sense of importance about their sex life are not worthy of consideration in any event.