Oh, boy.
What we have this episode is a couple of films where you don’t know whom to root for. Why? Because everybody is either compromised or just plain reprehensible.
We start with Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend, from 1967. This film opens with a married couple that’s fallen so far out of love with one another that they’re each plotting to kill the other one, once their ship has come in (in the form of an inheritance). These are some truly terrible people in a film full of terrible people. But it’s a darkly comic journey through the French countryside.
From there we move on to 1968 and Ingmar Bergman’s Shame, wherein Max Von Sydow and Liv Ullmann are a married couple who learn the hard way that when you hide from the war, it comes and finds you anyway. And then it changes you, and forces you to accept the things you once found unacceptable.
COMING ATTRACTIONS:Â
In Reel 27, we lighten up just a little bit as we take a look at a pair of films that feature the unlikely plot point of gangsters fighting against…Nazis? Yes, indeed. First we have All Through the Night, from 1942 (so, in the heart of the war). From there we jump to 1991 and The Rocketeer, which is actually set in pre-war California, but that’s okay: Nazis were already a thing by then.
