The Sixties

LE JOLI MAI (1962) (A) - Chris Marker's masterpiece still feels raw and relevant. In the manner of Wiseman and the Maysles brothers, this verite documentary takes a snapshot of Paris in May 1962, just after the end of the hostilities with Algeria -- in fact, in the wake of more than two decades of continuous war, including WWII and Vietnam.

Marker, working with Pierre Lhomme and a team of eager young filmmakers, creates what is essentially a two-and-a-half-hour man-on-the-street segment. With minimal editing, he films a wide cross-section of Parisians discussing what they want out of life now that, for the first time in a generation, they need not be in daily survival mode. The ending includes a recitation of statistics about the city's consumption during the month of may, from electricity usage to Gitanes produced.

It is difficult to translate the substance of the interviews in a review. And while there are moments of profundity, what matters here is the mood and the miracle of forever bookmarking a specific time and place, a time of hangover and the licking of wounds and the eve of the explosion of the earth-shattering Sixties.

Here, folks just want to run a small business, start a family, petition the government for fair wages, or buy a television to enjoy the burgeoning medium. They want a simple, pleasant life.

The filmmakers' cameras don't just blankly record interviews. The cameras yearn and search, they thirst for human interaction, like a castaway newly loosed upon the general population. The cameras are restless, peeling away from the main subject to nervously survey other people or details of the surroundings. They zoom in across distances to lock in on faces, both pensive and playful. Marker is particularly partial to random shots of cats.

In the end, this timely documentary is focused on big ideas revolving around the question of what kind of society the French wanted to create in a time of of relative peace with the hope of prosperity. What is truth? How can we eliminate poverty? What does it mean to be truly free?

BURNING BUSH (A-minus) -  Agnieszka Holland ("Europa, Europa") plunges into the late '60s with this three-part, four-hour dramatization of the student protest movement following Prague spring. The unbearable heart-wrenching story of Jan Palach, who immolated himself in Wenceslas Square, hangs over Czechoslovakia, as Holland turns this into a highly personal police procedural.

At times this echoes "The Lives of Others," in its depiction of low-level communist apparatchiks struggling to survive under Soviet occupation. Trust is in short supply. The official truth often has no legitimate relationship with the real truth.

Holland leans on a heroine to push the narrative along: Dagmar Buresova (Tatiana Pauhofova), the attorney who represented Palach's family in a defamation suit against a Central Committee member who criticized the 21-year-old who had become a symbol of the resistance (and remains so to this day). Dagmar and her husband (raising two daughters) suffer career repercussions from her challenge to power. Dagmar, an attractive doe-eyed redhead, fends off the sexist remarks of the era, and Holland often suggests temptation in various places but avoids cliched relationship potholes throughout.

Some of the scenes focusing on the student movement feel undercooked, and Palach's suffering mother lays the sorrow on thick, but David-vs.-Goliath tale churns along powerfully. Part 3 turns into a fairly traditional police/courtroom procedural -- "Law and Order" meets "A Separation" -- leading to an anti-climactic ending.

Holland richly renders the era in loving detail. The opening scene of Palach flailing in flames to the horror of those in the square jolts things into place. In other scenes she quietly shocks the viewer with the subtle horrors inflicted on individuals by the totalitarian system. The result is a pensive three hours that zip by in gripping drama.

BONUS TRACK
From "Burning Bush": the rockin' little number that opens the film from Petr Novak, and some quiet soundtrack music: