Pierre Thoretton’s documentary L’amour fou opens with two clips of men bidding farewell. The first, from 2002, is of the French-Algerian couturier Yves Saint Laurent announcing his retirement in a moving and emotional speech worthy of his favorite writer Marcel Proust. The second is of Pierre Bergé, Saint Laurent’s longtime business partner and former lover, eulogizing his departed friend at the designer’s memorial service six years later.

Thoretton’s film is suffused with goodbyes, many tender and candid, some portentous and rehearsed. To be sure, L’amour fou is a touching portrait of the powerful and tempestuous bond between Saint Laurent and Bergé, a bond that lasted close to five decades and resulted in one of the great empires of 20th century fashion. But it is also, alongside David Teboud’s two 2002 YSL documentaries, another entry in the hagiography of Saint Laurent, one cannily steered by Bergé as much as by Thoretton.

To say that Bill Cunningham, the 82-year old New York Times photographer, has made documenting how New Yorkers dress his life’s work would be an understatement. To be sure, Cunningham’s two decades-old Sunday Times columns — “On the Street,” which tracks street-fashion, and “Evening Hours,” which covers the charity gala circuit — are about the clothes. And, my, what clothes they are.

But Cunningham is a sartorial anthropologist, and his pictures always tell the bigger story behind the changing hemlines, which socialite wore what designer, or the latest trend in footwear. Whether tracking the near-infinite variations of a particular hue, a sudden bumper-crop of cropped blazers, or the fanciful leaps of well-heeled pedestrians dodging February slush puddles, Cunningham’s talent lies in his ability to recognize fleeting moments of beauty, creativity, humor, and joy.

That last quality courses through Bill Cunningham New York, Richard Press’ captivating and moving portrait of a man whose reticence and personal asceticism are proportional to his total devotion to documenting what Harold Koda, chief curator at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, describes in the film as “ordinary people going about their lives, dressed in fascinating ways.”

Press goes about filming Cunningham the way the photographer claims to capture his own subjects: “discreetly, quietly, invisibly.” Press, along with producer Philip Gefter and cinematographer Tony Cenicola (also a Times staff photographer), followed Cunningham for two years with no crew (after Press spent eight attempting to get Cunningham’s consent), tailing the photographer from uptown soirees to the runways of Paris fashion week.

Interspersed with Cunningham’s own sharp insights and footage of the photographer biking around Manhattan and throwing himself into oncoming traffic to get the perfect shot, are interviews with old friends and frequent subjects: Upper West Side grandes dames, fashion powerhouses, former editors, neighbors, and strutting peacocks. The loving accounts they share of encounters with Cunningham sing his artistic praises and unwavering kindness but stop short of revealing much about the man himself, save for his monasticism.

Cunningham famously lived for decades in a tiny studio apartment above Carnegie Hall filled almost exclusively with negative-stuffed file cabinets and an Army cot. His uniform is the cheap blue jacket worn by French street sweepers, augmented by a duct-tapped poncho in inclement weather. He rarely stops to schmooze, let alone sleep or eat. When a real estate agent shows Cunningham, who over the course of filming was evicted from his Carnegie Hall cell, the kitchen of the new apartment he will be relocated to, he genially scoffs, “What would I do with that?”

Cunningham’s disdain for the material and emotional comforts most of us take for granted might seem at odds with the worlds he documents (perhaps the film’s most shocking moment comes when Cunningham casually reveals he has never been in a romantic relationship). Fashion has become a hydra-headed beast of which street style, and the myriad bloggers who document it, have been completely swallowed by.

What Bill Cunningham New York makes clear, however, is that for this man, sustained by indefatigable reserves of passion and the ability to see what others can’t, the pursuit of beauty is not merely his chosen vocation; it has always been and always will be a calling.

[Originally published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian]

Gasper Noé’s Enter the Void is destined to join the ranks of Pink Floyd’s the Wall, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Trainspotting as a go-to visual aid for casual substance users in dorm rooms across the globe. Perhaps it will prompt those same buzzed, perhaps straight and probably male viewers to muse on what happens to us after we die, or whether or not something akin to that great unknown can be experienced while under the influence, or if one can ever truly approximate either tripping or dying, or both, on film.

With a near 50-feature filmography filled with its share of double-crossed gunslingers, wronged toughs, and shattered loyalties, director Johnnie To knows a thing or two about vengeance. To’s latest bullet-riddled ballet follows a familiar trajectory for the Hong Kong filmmaker and his frequent collaborator Wai Ka Fai (who wrote the screenplay; Vengeance, which played the San Francisco International Film Festival 2010 and returns to the SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki, is an elegant and masterful treatise on its titular subject that holds up to such previous triumphs as Exiled (2006) and The Mission (1999).

Alain Resnais’ feisty new film, Wild Grass, is a bit of a head-scratcher. I was as charmed as I was confused. But I’m glad I didn’t leave the screening room feeling as if I had all the pieces. As my bf pointed out, it’s a little strange how the film’s US promotional campaign loudly trumps Resnais’ now-canonical past achievements (“from the director of Last Year at Marienbad and Hiroshima Mon Amour”) as if they were art house successes of recent memory. Of course, those are the films for which he is best known, even though he’s made near 20 other features in the decades since. I guess this goes to show the selectiveness of cultural memory as well as the increasing difficulty of netting international theatrical distribution outside of the festival circuit (I’ll admit that I have yet to catch up on the director’s filmography since those aforementioned classics). Still, Wild Grass proves that Resnais isn’t content to rest on his laurels. In the past I haven’t re-posted the shorter takes on films I occasionally write for the Bay Guardian, but I was particularly pleased with how my review of Wild Grass turned out. You can check it out after the jump.

On the night of June 28, 1969, police embarked on what they thought would be a routine raid on a gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village, the sleazy, Mafia-run Stonewall Inn. The ensuing three days of rioting — during which mostly young men and drag queens accustomed to being marginalized and hauled off to jail stood their ground and fought back — became what historian Lillian Faderman has called “the shot heard round the world” for LGBT activism: a spontaneous expression of street-level outrage that fueled the birth of a movement.

Senator John McCain may have been testing the limits of hyperbole when he claimed in the presidential debates that gazing into Vladimir Putin’s eyes he saw a “K,” a “G” and a “B,” but Russia’s unforeseen and boorish display of military grandstanding in Georgia gave cause for both candidates to make “curbing Russian aggression” a serious part of their foreign policy discussions. A different sort of Russian aggression is at work in Cargo 200, Alexei Balabanov’s latest nasty piece of work. […]