Michael Lonsdale

  • The Name of the Rose (1986)

    The Name of the Rose (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, September 2019) It’s been decades since I’ve read Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose and I certainly didn’t understand much of it at the time—it’s the kind of novel with so much depth that it obscures its own narrative strengths through an excess of detail. Fortunately, writer-director Jean-Jacques Annaud’s film adaptation wisely knows what to keep and what to simplify. The result is a surprisingly engaging story of murder, inquisition, books, sex, and hidden labyrinths set in a fourteenth-century monastery … featuring a medieval version of Sherlock Holmes. Sean Connery is splendid as the protagonist, a contemporary mind stuck in the dark ages, whose gravelly wisdom only breaks into giddiness within a library. (Ah, a character after my own heart!)  A still-impressive support cast rounds The Name of the Rose, with Michael Lonsdale and F. Murray Abraham being their usual selves, and early but substantial roles for both Christian Slater and Ron Perlman. Still, it’s the plot that takes centre stage, what with a murder investigation conducted very much against the leaders of the abbey, and a merciless inquisitor taking matters in his own hands. It’s a heady mixture, and the film never gets any better than when the characters break into a hidden library broken up in a maze. Annaud may have stripped much of the extraneous meta-semiotic material, but enough cleverness remains to make The Name of the Rose a superior thriller—more ambitious, decidedly more atmospheric and certainly more interesting than most.

  • Le procès [The Trial] (1962)

    Le procès [The Trial] (1962)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2019) I generally enjoyed watching much of Le procès, but it’s clear that I’m not smart enough to understand this film. Coming from writer-director Orson Welles’s middle-years phase, it’s an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, and it plays up the disorienting nature of the original text. As a man is accused of some unspecified offence, his attempts to understand the charges and defend himself are constantly rebuffed by an uncaring system that barely seems human. The story is not meant to be understood—it’s meant to be felt, and Welles gets to work in splendidly visual fashion, putting his characters in vast cavernous spaces, confronting them with early computers and nightmarish bureaucracy. From a purely cinematographic standpoint, there’s a lot to like here. The casting is also nothing short of amazing, in between names such as Anthony Perkins, Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, Michael Lonsdale and Orson Welles himself. Where the film intentionally falls apart is in making sense of it all. It’s not supposed to, and yet at times it feels like anything for anything’s sake. Many shots are arresting; some of the absurdity is funny; but eventually, Le procès hits a point where the whole thing feels too long and undercooked. Nonetheless, it clearly remains an Orson Welles film, and one where he really gets to work his magic.

  • Moonraker (1979)

    Moonraker (1979)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second or third viewing, On Blu-ray, October 2018) It’s said that everyone’s favourite Bond is the one they grew up with, and so I discovered the Bond series during the Roger Moore era, most specifically in between the TV broadcast of Moonraker and the theatre release of For Your Eyes Only. (If memory serves, because the series was regularly broadcast on French-Canadian TV, we had just got a VCR and you can imagine the rest.) I even remember watching the movie and talking to the adults in the room about special effects (how that skydiving sequence was made!) and budgets (they were really impressed by how Bond went around the world in the movie, most notably when he rides in Guatemala). So, yeah, I imprinted on Bond at the silliest time possible, on the one movie in the series that is widely regarded as the most outlandish, perhaps even the silliest in a series of movies not always known for their seriousness. I was a science-fiction fan even back then, so that Bond was only a step removed from Star Wars (which also played on TV a lot in the early 1980s). All of which to say that even if I can reasonably agree that Moonraker is a film with glaring problems, you will never—ever—manage to talk me away from an irrational fondness for that film. Third and perhaps worst outing for Moore as Bond, Moonraker shows the extent of the Star Wars craze of the late seventies as Bond goes through the motions of the usual formula, only to spend the last act of the film in orbit, all the way to a fancy space laser battle between American Marines and evil henchmen. No Bond movies ever went that crazy nor as silly than the infamous Venice sequence in which even a pigeon does a double-take. But that was the nature of the Moore years, and it’s rather unfair to start picking at the film’s numerous logical impossibilities when the point is having Bond escape death every ten minutes and showing off a special effects budget clearly much increased over previous films. It’s a rollercoaster ride across the globe, as the action moves from one continent to another and from one set-piece to the next. It doesn’t always work: “California” looks a lot like France (hilariously acknowledged by the film itself), and the special effects work is very uneven, especially during action scenes where impressive stunt-work is intercut against rear-projection shots of the main actors. The character of Jaws is reduced to an annoying running gag, Bond’s serial conquests are exasperating (especially how it callously leads to a nightmarish death that feels jarringly out-of-place with the silliness surrounding it) and the quips are lame. Still, I really like Michael Lonsdale as the villain, Lois Chiles is not bad as an agent who’s at least supposed to be Bond’s equal (as usual, the film inevitably falters on true equality, although at least it’s better than the abysmal Connery years) and—this is the crucial part—there is a space laser battle around an orbital evil lair. I won’t argue that Moonraker is at the extreme silliness spectrum of the Bond series, nor will I renege on my outright admiration for the more serious entries such as On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Casino Royale or Skyfall. But I still like Moonraker a lot as a middle-aged adult even if I can see the flaws that completely escaped me as a kid.