The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, March 9-15
My Little Loves (1974)
Directed by Jean Eustache
Eustache frequently filmed conversations, but the exchanges between people in his films are based on far more than words. His performers transmit subtly kinetic looks to express the extent to which they feel in kinship. Whether the films’ pairings be those of Eustache himself and his tale-telling grandmother in the documentary Número zero, the onscreen storytellers and their listeners in the documentary-narrative hybrid A Dirty Story, or the myriad young men and women who warily-lustily walk together in the director’s autobiographical fictions, the works convey hardness and softness by showing the extent to which people engage with each other in making life a shared private joke. The beautiful-looking My Little Loves’s sense of humor is dark. Eustache’s color feature-length fiction follow-up to his black-and-white epic The Mother and the Whore follows a provincial French adolescent (played by Martin Loeb) as he leaves his grandmother’s village to live with his steely mother (Ingrid Caven) and her lover (Dionys Mascalo) in another town against his will. While he narrates his experiences in past-tense voiceover, we watch the school-deprived boy go to work in a mechanic’s shop, frequent the cinema, and awkwardly edge his way towards diffident-seeming girls. The film’s title is based on a Rimbaud poem, and as the youth seeks and dreams of companionship, it comes to resonate with complex irony. Aaron Cutler (March 10, 4:45pm, 9:30pm; March 11, 1:30pm, 10:30pm; March 12, 4:45pm, 8:45pm; March 14, 7pm; March 16, 5pm at the Metrograph’s Eustache series)