Good-humored filmmaker

POSTED ON OCTOBER 19, 2018

The cultivated critic and filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich is fêted at the Lumière festival. Virginie Apiou approaches his cinema with zeal.

Peter Bogdanovich is not only a man who has been able to create, serve, and bear witness to the great history of cinema, he is also a filmmaker of good humor. On the screen, he projects on screen the love of everything: life, cinema, others, otherwise known as the happiness of existing without ever descending into cheap sentimentality, on the contrary, integrating a fair share of cruelty and fateful blows. He is one of those creators who has found how to turn the somewhat difficult upheavals of American reality into sunny, noble, inspiring and fast worlds. Just see Saint Jack, featuring a perpetually smiling Ben Gazzara, despite the considerable troubles of his character (the mafia, pretty girls), to appreciate Bogdanovich’s cool approach.

CHow can we not to marvel at Barbra Streisand's charming nerve, fortunately unbearable, against a Ryan O'Neal that needs to be shaken awake, in What’s Up, Doc? The Bogdanovich tempo is there, often assigning roles to women, heroines who are really funny, alive, untenable. Girls too, little girls, like in Paper Moon, or young women filmed in black and white, determined not to let things happen despite themselves in The Last Picture Show. There is an elegant melancholy in all these films. Melancholy so dear to François Truffaut, who preferred the sustained rhythm of his films to the tempo of real life. For all these reasons, we must salute the work of Bogdanovich, where we don’t let ourselves get knocked down, we fight back with style and intelligence.

Virginie Apiou