Match Point [Woody Allen, 2005, Grade: B]
Merci pour le chocolat [Claude Chabrol, 2000, Grade: B]

I realize that this could have just shown up in What Have You Seen Lately? However, why not post something new? I don't recall a Chabrol thread anywhere, and he's my fave New Wave director, with Truffaut second. Here's what I'm trying to say: these movies were both made by 70-year-olds, and by some trick of my Scarecrow-type non-brain, I rented and watched them back-to-back.

Both films are their directors' best in recent years. Both films are about murder. Both films are about how someone gets something and tries to keep it, no matter what it is. That something seems to involve luxury and family, but not exactly passion. How the protagonists deal with their situations is what makes the films work.

Woody Allen has some experience with murder, if you've seen Crimes and Misdemeanors, Manhattan Murder Mystery and Bullets Over Broadway. Match Point is a filmed steamy sex novel, masquerading as a film noir. Well, to anyone who knows anything about modern-day sex novels (I'm illiterate, but my wife isn't), it's kinda on the predictable side, plus I don't agree with Holden that an hour and a half of set-up equals character development and suspense. Even so, this film, and its Dostoyevsky-fixation is quite entertaining and just keeps getting better and better, even though I don't really buy what happens. The coup Woody does is to try to convince you that an inverted remake of An American Tragedy is right for our times, and damned if I didn't really buy into that. Entertainment and Chutzpah have their own rewards, I guess. Actually, this is one of the more recent films where I believe a sequel could work.

Claude Chabrol's film, even if it seems more obvious in other ways, is just a sly delight. It's so much much more complex in its tale of babies possibly being switched at birth, they're not learning about it until they come of age, what family means to some people (think: Norman Bates), and how some people are too obsessed with their own "careers" to care about their "families". My favorite visuals in the film are the night driving scenes, which sent me lovingly back to the similar scenes in my fave Chabrol, Le Boucher. The other thing about this film is the music. While I admired Woody's use of Enrico Caruso in Match Point, it got a bit repressive after awhile. This film utililizes classical piano music, but it mixes it up in style, and the piano playing becomes as thrilling as the mystery of did she or didn't she? As the possible Black Widow, Isabelle Huppert is wonderful, especially at the end when she crawls up into her web and goes fetal at the same time.