LOVE AND AIR SEX: the rom-com meets Bryan Poyser; the result is transgressive and sweet

Crude beyond belief -- and in the most endearing manner -- the new film from the very oddly talented Bryan Poyser, LOVE AND AIR SEX, is something to see, hear and experience for yourself. It's hard to think of another movie at once so hugely transgressive and absolutely dedicated to the eternal verities like love and decency. What a trip this movie is! Mr. Poyser (shown below) is the fellow who, via his three full-length films so far, has given us quite a range of human activity -- all of it based around our need for love and acceptance. And sex. Of all sorts.

In his first of those films, Dear Pillow, which hit us just about one decade ago, Poyser explored everything from creativity and pornography to possible man-boy love while keeping you fascinated and off-base. In Lovers of Hate -- from 2010 and which, oddly enough received its theatrical run a full year after its VOD release -- Poyser plays around with love & desire, sex & jealousy, and has you alternately laughing and wincing. Now with this new one, by far his best, as well as his biggest-budget film, he tracks a young split-up couple (two of them actually) and via a kind of performance art (the love & air sex thing), he shows us how some things innate to us human beings simply refuse to roll over and die. Even in this age of irony.

The two couples are played by four lovely actors who beautifully nail their characters, while entertaining us grandly in the process. Ashley Bell (above) and Michael Stahl-David (below, right) play one set, with each one the shy and retiring type -- which the film, always threatening to go over the top, dearly needs.

The other twosome -- just about constantly in your (and their own) face -- is handled by Zach Cregger (above, left) and Sara Paxton (below), the latter in a ground-breaking turn that should turn a lot of heads as to the kind of versatility this young actress might possess.

The two pair are so different that they rather balance each other out, while keeping the movie rolling forward and forever on its toes. Love & Air Sex is also a kind of Valentine to the city of Austin, where most of the movie takes place. It makes this city look so wonderfully inviting and welcoming -- as well as cutting-edge -- that you'll probably want to move there forthwith. (Really: even though it's in Texas.)

Poyser has both directed and had a hand in the screenplay (along with David DeGrow Shotwell and Steven Walters), and while not knowing just who is responsible for what, I have to commend the team on creating some lovely subsidiary characters, too. If the two fellows played by Justin Arnold (above, right) and Marshall Allman (below, right) don't charm the pants off you (as they do our two heroines), then you must be in your underwear already.

The way in which the filmmaker has offered up his story, you really won't know just how he's going to end it. So just-possibly-right-for-each-other are several of these characters that we keep having our expectations upended. This is pleasurable and fairly unusual for a rom-com, which is what Love & Air Sex certainly is. But it's a rom-com with welcome smarts, style and a good deal of street cred. So go, giggle, gasp and enjoy.

From Tribeca Film and running just 91 minutes, the movie opens this Friday at the Cinema Village here in NYC, and elsewhere soon. There will also be a number of personal appearances made by filmmakers and cast. Check the list below to learn if any of them take place near you.

February 7 - New York, NY: Opening at Cinema Village Guests include stars Ashley Bell, Michael Stahl-David, Sara Paxton, director Bryan Poyser, producer Trace Sheehan, and Air Sex Emcee Chris Trew among others. February 14 – Austin, TX: Opening at Alamo Drafthouse Cinema – Slaughter Lane Guests include director Bryan Poyser and star Sara Paxton among others. February 20 - Dallas, TX: Opening at Texas Theater (one night only) Guests include director Bryan Poyser and writer Steven Walters among others. February 21- San Francisco, CA: Opening at Roxie Theater Guests include star Michael Stahl-David and director Bryan Poyser among others. March 1 -Los Angeles, CA: Opening at Crest Theater (one night only) Guests include stars Zach Cregger, Sara Paxton, Michael Stahl-David, director Bryan Poyser, and producer Trace Sheehan among others. April 19 –Seattle, WA: Opening at SIFF Cinema Uptown (one night only) Special guests TBA.

Claude Lanzmann's documentary on Benjamin Murmelstein, THE LAST OF THE UNJUST, opens

If the concentration camps of the Holocaust were all horrible, then Theresienstadt -- located in Terezín, in what is now the Czech Republic (Theresien-stadt is the German name for the camp) -- was doubly so, for it was meant to maintain in the public's mind the image of a kind of "model ghetto," devised by Adolf Eichmann and designed to mislead the world in terms of its actual goal: the penultimnate step before the gas chamber's final solution. Claude Lanzmann's new film, THE LAST OF THE UNJUST, takes its title from the famous French novel by André Schwarz-Bart, The Last of the Just, an amazing work that turns the Holocaust into horror, hope and art. That novel was Trust Movies' favorite from his college days. (He has not read it since then but has been told that it holds up very well.)

Long, but less than half the length of his monumental (and finally monumentally boring: the trains, the trains!) Holocaust documentary, Shoah, this "new" film from M. Lanzmann (the filmmaker is shown above by, yes, another railroad track) was actually shot almost 40 years ago (at left, below, is the director when his hair was still black rather than grey), and an additional 30 years after the events recalled by its subject, Benjamin Murmelstein (shown at right, below), the last Jewish Elder of the Theresienstadt concentration camp. While all the Jewish Elders (there were several) at this camp were caught in the middle of the ultimate "rock and a hard place" -- serving as they did as middle men between the Nazi atrocities and the Jewish victims -- only Murmelstein managed to survive.

Instead he probes this man whom history hangs over like a shroud. Yet Murmelstein is remarkably jovial, with a memory, it would appear, like a steel trap. Here, above, Lanzmann interviews Murmelstein, who was brought to trial post-WWII for his supposed crimes and collaboration with the Nazis, but he was let go unscathed. The man explains some things, while completely leaving out any mention of others. He's full of spunk, clearly loves to talk and had what appears to be remarkable recall, though whether he was a completely "reliable witness," I rather doubt. (Still, what human being is?)

I’m not sure that I trust Murmelstein's remembrances, even though, in this film, he’s all we have. Lanzman offers a few pertinent questions and occasionally tries to draw the man further out, but to not much avail. Mumelstein has such energy and drive, however, that for quite awhile he pulled me in and kept me going. But as the movie wore on, by the end I was tired of his nattering voice and found myself questioning much that he said. His comments on how laughable is Arendt's "banality-of-evil" theory regarding Adolf Eichman completely bypasses, of course, her more important comments about how the Jews might better have survived had they not been so organizedly in thrall to leaders like Murmelstein. Tradition has its drawbacks.

Further, I would have liked to have known what went on at his trial, what happened to his family, and other things we don’t learn. But the film certainly deserves a place of importance in permanent Holocaust history by virtue of its subject, and the fact that this is the only such interview that exists. Even considering all the Holocaust movies I’ve already seen, I still learned a lot from this one. And I only nodded off a couple of times during the nearly four-hour film -- both of them when a certain cantor was singing (and singing and singing). M. Lanzmann seems intent on memorializing the victims via religion. As my regular readers will know by now, I have little taste for this sort of thing, or for organized religion of any kind.

Using everything from art (above) to maps and diagrams (below) to present-day visuals (at bottom), Lanzmann weaves an emcompassing look at Theresienstadt throughout the documentary, so that we enter history from the three time periods: during the Holocaust, the interview 30 years later, and now. Yet the time spent, it seems to me, could have been used more wisely and cogently by less wandering around and sharper questioning of Murmelsitein.

Still, The Last of the Unjust is an important addition to Holocaust history, and as such deserves to be seen and argued over -- and kept available for posterity to view and argue over in perpetuity. Thanks to Lanzmann, we've got Murmelstein. But you'll come away from the film wondering how thankful the Jews of Theresienstadt actually were that they had him.

From Cohen Media Group, in French and German with English subtitles, and running 218 minutes (yes, that's 3 hours and 38 minutes), the movie opens this Friday, February 7, here in New York City, exclusively at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema, and in Los Angeles at Laemmle's Royal and Town Center 5 -- after which the film will have a limited national rollout.

From Paraguay: Maneglia and Schembori's SEVEN BOXES has charm, spirit--and body parts

If the new chase thriller SEVEN BOXES becomes the first film from Paraguay that you've seen, don't be surprised. Its creators Juan Carlos Maneglia and Tana Schembori, who directed and also wrote (with some help from Tito Chamorro) are evidently well-known in their little South American country and have studied movies well and smartly and appear to have learned a lot. Their clever little film steals from just about everything else you've seen down the decades yet their setting seems so unusual and shabbily exotic and the cast of characters is such a unique mix of the quirky, creepy and sweet that you may find it very difficult not to give over to the odd charms herein.

Maneglia and Schembori (shown above, with Ms S on the right) have concocted a surprisingly complicated scenario, despite the movie's advertising tag line above (which happens not to be true), but their film-making skills are such that they allow us to easily follow the plot's many cleverly constructed convolutions.

A teenager named Victor (the spunky Celso Franco, above and on those TV Screens) thinks he has lucked into a "dream" delivery job of taking seven boxes out for a little walk from their residence in a butcher shop in order to avoid being seen by the authorities. What's in the boxes? Money or drugs, we imagine. For this, he'll earn enough dough to buy a nice cell phone. If only. (That's one of the sleazy butchers giving our boy instructions, below.)

As the plot thickens, we're introduced to Victor's sister and her very pregnant co-worker, who labor in a Chinese restaurant where the owner's son has eyes for sis (the film offers an interesting look at Asian immi-grants in Paraguay); some rather inept kidnappers; a father whose infant child needs medication, a group of nasty Paraguayan low-lifes (below), and a pert and very likable young woman who is clearly carrying a torch for our Victor (played by the very talented and spikey Lali Gonzalez).

How all these mix and mingle proves frightening, funny, surprising and exciting. The filmmakers have their pacing down pat, and their cast delivers good performances first to last. Once the wheels (and wheelbarrows used for delivery) are set in motion, the movie clicks and clacks along like an unstoppable locomotive.

A kind of coming-of-age tale, Seven Boxes' ace-in-the-hole is how much charm and spirit it provides, which is particularly commendable, considering how grizzly the goings-on become. Yet the film's sweetness easily surmounts its body count.

Seven Boxes, from Breaking Glass Pictures and running 100 minutes, opens in theaters (the listing is shown below) this Friday, February 7, and simultaneously will be available via VOD and iTunes.

In New York City--Cinema Village;  Los Angeles, CA--Downtown Independent;  Pasadena, CA--Laemmle Playhouse 7; Chicago, IL--Siskel Film Center; Sante Fe, NM--Jean Cocteau Cinema; Scottsdale, AZ--Harkins Shea. The following Friday, February 14, look for it in Toronto, ON--Carlton Cinema; Miami, FL--Coral Gables Art Cinema; Saskatoon, SK--Roxy Theater; and elsewhere across the country & Canada in the weeks ahead.

Stream a charmer: Mitchell & Walker's adorable sci-fi/musical, THE HISTORY OF FUTURE FOLK

Irresistible. That pretty much covers this one-of-a-kind sweetheart of a movie, THE HISTORY OF FUTURE FOLK, directed by John Mitchell (no, not Martha's late husband) and Jeremy Kipp Walker, with a screenplay by Mr. Mitchell. From the Netflix description alone, you might just stick this one on your to-see list. That would be a good thing because the movie itself is so enchanting and endearing in its simple, storybook manner that, if you love tall tales and movies done with a tiny budget and major talent, you can't go wrong.

Mitchell (shown at left) and Walker below, right) conceive a story of an alien race come to take over earth via one, General Trius from planet Hondo (yes, let's hear a shout-out to John Wayne!). But then, our general hears something that makes him immediately fall in love with earth and decide to stick around awhile.

Soon, he is joined by a second alien named Kevin, sent as a follow-up plan to make certain the

original plan is followed -- and fast. But Kevin, too, quickly succumbs. Soon this very odd duo are making music and singing their bizarre-but delightful little songs to an ever more crowded Brooklyn bar-and-stage venue. The story here is simplicity itself, and so are the songs our two heroes sing. Yet the music -- bluegrassy and sweet, with lovely harmonies and lyrics that make you listen and grin -- is (in the best sense of the word) precious. And the telling of the tale is done so sweetly and straight, with hardly a moment pushed or a feeling overdone, that tagging along is as easy as pie.

The cast is just right, too -- from the hunky/handsome General Trius (Nils d'Aulaire, at left) and the rotund and comic Kevin (Jay Klaitz, below) to the lovely girls in their lives Julie Anne Emery, April L. Hernandez and Onota Aprile (yes, Maisie from What Maisie Knew!) -- so that the combo of writing, directing and acting joins forces to create something just about perfect. Keeping all the balls in the air -- and everyone concerned on the same page (to mix some metaphors) -- is never easy in a film in which so much depends on precisely the right tone. But everyone here manages to carry it off beautifully. So much so, in fact, that rather soon after the film starts, you simply relax into its oddness, lean back and enjoy.

As much as a sweet sci-fi tale, the movie is also a paean to the joy of music -- something that nearly all of us can understand and believe in, I think. It imagines a world quite similar to Brooklyn in which police are kind and helpful, and your neighbors are, too.

It even imagines a universe in which one world can aid another, even if -- for the sake of a few moments of scary monster stuff (above) -- we meet that proverbial fly in the ointment.

So grab your kids (or grandkids; in fact any other family members and friends), sit 'em down in front of the TV, and give them and yourself a whopping good time. You can catch The History of Future Folk now via Netflix streaming, as well as on Amazon Instant Video -- or on DVD, for rental or purchase.

Here's FIAF's February CinéSalon calendar of French film classics, 3 in new digital restoration!

What a treasure trove is the current French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) program called CinéSalon! Last month's films were shown here, and I'll have next month's posted by March 1. Meanwhile four very special Tuesdays are headed your way in February. These include films by Renoir, Demy, Ophüls and Chabrol -- three (those by Demy, above and below, Renoir and Chabrol shown further below) to be screened in new digital restorations.

In the spirit of French ciné-clubs and literary salons, FIAF’s new CinéSalon pairs an engaging film with a post-screening wine reception. Films are shown Tuesdays at 4 and 7:30pm, and every screening is followed by a get-together with a complimentary glass of wine. And as a bonus, each 7:30 screening will be thoughtfully introduced by a high-profile personality in the arts.

Boudu Saved from Drowning 
(Boudu sauvé des eaux)
Tuesday, February 4 at 4 & 7:30pm
Free wine reception following each screening.
New Digital Restoration
Directed by Jean Renoir, 1932. B&W. 84 min.
With Michel Simon, Charles Granval, Marcelle Hainia, Séverine Lerczinska
In French with English subtitles

If you haven't seen this, one of the great and most humane of human comedies, by the incomparable Jean Renior and starring the great actor and comedian Michel Simon, here's your chance. And if you've seen the perfectly OK Paul Mazursky update, you still need to see the original. The story:. By rescuing Boudu, a tramp, from his deadly jump into the Seine, middle-class bookseller Lestingois (Granval) unwittingly invites chaos into his life, upending everything he holds dear.

The 7:30pm screening will be presented by award-winning author, director and screenwriter Henry Bean, who has worked in Hollywood for more than 30 years, writing, among other films, Internal Affairs, Deep Cover, and Basic Instinct 2. He also wrote and directed The Believer, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. Most recently, Bean worked on Chantal Akerman’s last film, Almayer’s Folly, nominated for four Magritte Awards, the Belgian equivalent to the Academy Awards.

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Une chambre en ville
Tuesday, February 11 at 4 & 7:30pm
Free wine reception following each screening.
New Digital Restoration
Directed by Jacques Demy, 1982. Color. 90 min.
With Dominique Sanda, Danielle Darrieux, Richard Berry, Michel Piccoli
In French with English subtitles

"Late in his career," we are told in the FIAF press material, "Jacques Demy set out to dramatize the shipyard strikes that occurred in his hometown during the 50s. The result was Une chambre en ville, which pushes his trademark visual and musical styles into darker territory." Unfortunately, those styles do not survive the trip. TrustMovies had never seen this little movie until now, and he would not have missed it under any circumstance, being a huge Demy fan. If you're one, too, then grab this rare chance to see it. That said, what worked for this unique filmmaker in his earlier, lighter musicals such as Umbrellas and Young Girls, comes a cropper here, turning its tale of love-at-first-sight (with idiocy following fast after), class, politics, and demonstrators vs police into the kind of melodramatic gush that falls well over any conceivable boundary into the realm of camp.

The movie is all singing (but no dancing: come on, this is tragedy!), but its weakest link is the terrible score, composed by Michel Columbier. Whatever you might have thought of Michel Legrand's scores for the earlier films, they seem like high art compared with this one -- in which there resides not a hummable melody. Rather there's a kind of continual recitative with the occasional faux climax to make us think we've heard an actual "song." Still, that stellar cast almost makes the whole thing bearable (of them, only Ms Darrieux gets to sing her own numbers). As I say, I would not have missed the chance to see Une Chambre en ville (which translates as 'A Room in Town'), but that's not quite the same thing as telling you it's any good.

The 7:30pm screening will be presented by New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, one of the preeminent interpreters of contemporary life writing today. He is also the author of Paris to the Moon (2000), a collection of essays about Paris hailed by The New York Times as “the finest book on France in recent years.” Gopnik has won the National Magazine Award for Essays and for Criticism three times, and also the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting. In March 2013, he was awarded the medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.

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Lola Montès
Tuesday, February 18 at 4 & 7:30pm
Free wine reception following each screening.
Restored 35mm Print
Directed by Max Ophüls, 1955. Color. 115 min.
With Martine Carol, Peter Ustinov, Anton Walbrook, Oskar Werner
In English, German, and French with English subtitles

From FIAF's press release and very hard to disagree with: "Simply one of the most beautiful films ever made, Lola Montès was Ophüls’s first color film. As if to make up for lost time, the director saturates each scene with gorgeous technicolor tones as he relates the true story of a showgirl and an entertainer who was a paramour to men of renown.“ TrustMovies didn't always agree with late Andrew Sarris, but he certainly does regarding Lola Montès being one of the greatest films of all time. (My review of the film is here.) I've seen the film twice now and it's one of those I will want to view again in another couple of years. If you've never seen it, go for the big screen and this beautifully restored 35mm print.

The 7:30pm screening will be presented by painter Lola Montes Schnabel, who graduated with a BFA from the Cooper Union in 2008. She grew up experimenting with painting and film, as well as publishing a book with Artforum at the age of seven with her father, Julian Schnabel. Her work, which spans various media from film to painting, has been included in solo exhibitions at Tripoli Gallery, Southampton, NY; Ace Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; and The Hole, New York, NY. Ms Schnabel also serves on the board of advisors at Anthology Film Archives.

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The Color of Lies 
(Au cœur du mensonge)
U.S. big-screen premiere, and digitally remastered
Tuesday, February 25, 4 & 7:30pm
Free wine reception following each screening.
Directed by Claude Chabrol, 1999. Color. 113 min.
With Sandrine Bonnaire, Jacques Gamblin, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, and Antoine de Caunes
In French with English subtitles

The surface plot: a discovery of a dead young girl, raped and abandoned, horrifies the town she lived in. Soon, the art teacher (Gamblin) who last saw her is accused and vilified. While his wife (recent FIAF honoree Bonnaire) stands by with support, she also must attend to her own priorities. As usual, Chabrol is onto the bourgeoisie, its pettiness and hypocrisy, but here he goes more deeply than usual into character and relationship. Why this one was never released in the states (it has been available here on DVD for some time) remains a mystery. It is one of this master's more subtle movies; maybe that's the reason. In any case it is definitely worth seeing.

The 7:30pm screening will be presented by the film's hugely talented and very attractive star, Jacques Gamblin (at left, in Chabnrol's Inspector Bellamy, and above in The Color of Lies), an award-winning French film and stage actor, as well as a playwright. M. Gamblin has worked with major French filmmakers including Bertrand Tavernier (Safe Conduct), Claude Lelouch (Tout ça…pour ça!) and Philippe Lioret (Mademoiselle) -- among many others.. In 2011, he was nominated for a César Award for his performance in Le nom des gens directed by Michel Leclerc. Currently, Gamblin is touring in a one-man show based on Romain Gary’s La nuit sera calme, which he will perform at FIAF on Thursday, February 27.

We'll have the remaining CinéSalon movies for March up at the end of the month. Meanwhile, for more info, simply visit fiaf.org

Lee Liberman revisits Patrice Leconte's RIDICULE: income inequality circa 1780's France

Income inequality comes in cycles and ours is now reported to be more distorted in favor of the rich than at any other time since the 1930's. The fight to ease poverty is heating up -- and the palaver against.

A particularly bloody battle between haves and have-nots brought down the reign of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette while it cavorted in the face of its miserable citizens -- "the peasants are boring." France was mired in debt, starvation, and bread riots.

Already public opinion had soured on the monarchy after a successful American Revolution and circulation of Age of Reason writings on liberty, equality, and right to happiness. Victor Hugo's great long novel of 1862, "Les Miserables", told of hell on earth, in which all but the few have been degraded by poverty. But Stephen Frears' Dangerous Liasions (1988) and Patrice Leconte's RIDICULE (1996) take a different tack, focusing on the stultifying cruelty at and close to Versailles, skewering libertine courtier life with sharp satire and terrific story-telling. (For future note, Christopher Hampton who adapted the "Dangerous Liaisons" film from 18th-century novel,"Les Liaisons Dangereuses" by Choderios de Laclos, is now creating a series for the BBC based on similar material.)

Director Leconte (shown at left), known for Monsieur Hire, The Hairdresser's Husband, and The Widow of St Pierre (among many others) has a new film due in April, his first in English, A Promise, described by one reviewer as so-so viewing for the Masterpiece crowd, with Alan Rickman, Rebecca Hall, and Richard Madden. But Leconte's edgiest work is Ridicule. It combines elements of Les Miserables and Dangerous Liaisons into a taut fable about the .01% of the top 1%'s self-referential obsessions at court in the years leading up to revolution in 1789. Leconte's scriptwriting team, headed by Rémi Waterhouse, seeds plots, sub-plots, and passing chatter with rapier wit.

Ridicule satirizes the court but unlike Dangerous Liaisons, contrasts it to the poverty and misery across France. The story unfolds from the point of view of poor rural baron and engineer, Gregoire Poncedeludon (Charles Berling, shown above, right), whose peasants are dying from exposure to his mosquito-filled swamps located in an area of France called the Dombes. (The water pools had been created centuries earlier for fishing but had become disease breeding grounds.) The earnest baron is headed to Paris to persuade King Louis to help reconvert the swamps to tillable farm land.

Previewing what's ahead at court, the film starts with a maxim by the Duke of Guines: "In this country, vices are without consequences but ridicule can kill." The scene opens with the Marquis de Milletail (one of several dubious characters with Dickens-like satirical last names) paying a sick call on old Marquis de Blayac, laid up from a stroke, dying. Milletail makes no smalltalk before getting to the point of chiding Blayac for humiliating him years ago by nicknaming him 'Marquis de Stumblebum' after he had fallen at a ball. Milletail unleashes more spite -- he unzips full frontal and directs a long piss at the old man, later advising a servant in sympathetic tones that the ailing Marquis in his joy had forgotten himself.

Meanwhile young Ponceludon approaches Paris on horseback, his maps and engineering drawings in tow, when he is mugged and robbed by a peasant-turned-bandit. Gregoire is treated and taken in by a local doctor of modest means, the Marquis de Bellegarde (Jean Rochefort, shown two photos up), Bellegarde has a beautiful daughter Mathilde, (Judith Godrèche, above), a Rousseau-esque back-to-nature girl and budding scientist who is developing diving equipment for underwater study. She and Gregoire are a perfect match, but she engages herself to a very rich, old courtier who agrees, in exchange for two visits a month to his future wife's bed, to support her scientific research.

Meanwhile, Bellegarde offers to teach Gregoire how to get on at court. He is not to make a forthright case for his project but to train his wit on the King's inner circle; he must avoid sincerity and seriousness at all costs. Gregoire is clever at verbal repartee, quickly scoring points with recent widow Madam de Blayac (Fanny Ardant, above). She intends to replace her lover and priest, L'Abbe de Vilecourt, with the young baron and to assist her protege's access to King Louis. In addition to paying court to Mme Blayac, Gregoire takes on the Byzantine palace bureaucracy, being thwarted at every turn until Blayac begins pulling strings. Many comic (and not so) plot turns occur, in which Gregoire's love pangs, conscience, and fortunes rise and plummet until he finally wises up to the hopeless, endless cruelty of the court. His efforts there end in a fall at a ball. It bookends the Milletail vignette that prefaced the story, but Gregoire, who has more experience of life than the fools at court, takes nothing lying down.

Jump to 1790's England where the aristocracy including Mathilde's father, Dr. Bellegarde, have fled the Revolution. Bellegarde intends to support himself teaching French and medical sciences and will enjoy British humor more than cruel French wit. In 1795, says the afterward printed on screen: "Citizens Gregoire and Mathilde Ponceludon proceeded with the draining of the Dombes. Their lives were rid of pestilence, royal caprice, and the savage sting of aristocratic ridicule."

If the reader feels robbed by knowing the end of the story -- don't -- all the fun is getting there. If there's a rich one-percenter who has wandered into this space, take a look in the mirror and make sure you don't see a pre-revolution courtier there.

Ridicule is streamable now via Netflix, as well as available on DVD.

This post was written by Lee Liberman, 

who will be joining us now and again 

--maybe weekly--to cover the occasional film.

Her ability to weave both history and criticism 

into her writing is much appreciated by TrustMovies.