Essaying Assayas

The American Cinematheque’s “Fast Forward: Recent French Filmmaking, 1986-1998” snares your attention in an instant with its first offering, Olivier Assayas’ “Cold Water” (1994), which screens Friday at 7:30 p.m. at Raleigh Studios’ Chaplin Theater, where the retrospective screens Fridays and Saturdays through Jan. 31. “Fast Forward” includes a tribute to Assayas, a major ultra-contemporary talent whose work warrants far wider exposure in the U.S. than it has so far received.

Made for television as part of a series in which its contributors were asked to tell a story about being age 16, “Cold Water” opens in suburban Paris in 1972. Gilles (Cyprien Fouquet) and his beautiful girlfriend Christine (Virginie Ledoyen) rebel against the many oppressive authority figures in their lives, but the consequences are far more severe for Christine, who comes from a poor broken home, in contrast to Gilles’ solidly upper-middle-class household.

This is one of the most illuminating portrayals of the generation gap set at the very time the term was coming into widespread use. While Assayas makes it clear he is on the side of youth, he does not caricature adults, who nevertheless prove to be lousy listeners with a tendency to want to pack off their kids, whether to a boarding school or even a mental institution, rather than to hear them out. You empathize with the adults’ exasperation but not their lack of willingness in trying to find out what is really bothering their offspring. As for just how autobiographical “Cold Water” might be, you can ask Assayas, who will discuss his picture after its screening.

As a filmmaker, Assayas gets up close and personal, rarely allowing his camera to stop moving, and absolutely catches you up in the lives that he depicts with such honesty and compassion. “Cold Water” just builds and builds to a final moment that is a real stunner.

That cannot be said, unfortunately, for Friday’s second feature, Benoit Jacquot’s 1997 “Seventh Heaven,” screening at 9:30 p.m. This is a terrifically tedious account of an affluent Paris couple in which the wife (Sandrine Khiberlain) deals successfully with a feeling of malaise sweeping over via, apparently, hypnosis, only to find that her newfound happiness and stability prove threatening to her husband (Vincent London), whose sense of well-being swiftly erodes. It’s hard to fathom how this trite, talky business ended up in this series.

We’re back on course and then some with another knockout from Assayas, his highly ambitious and equally satisfying “A New Life” (Saturday at 7:15 p.m.). At first this 1993 release seems the reverse of “Cold Water,” with a take-charge young woman, Tina (Sophie Aubry), a warehouse worker, convinced that she and her fiance Fred (Philippe Torreton), an apprentice truck driver, can make a good life for themselves by dint of hard work. But “A New Life” proves to be a work of the ceaselessly unexpected when Tina decides to seek out the rich and powerful father she never knew and who has never wanted anything to do with her. Tina’s life turns into a series of adventures among the neither sweet nor charming bourgeoise, where Tina discovers that while she can defend her principles, her emotions make her vulnerable. “A New Life” is as impassioned as it is giddy, funny as it is sad.

Even more intense is Catherine Breillat’s corrosive 1996 venture into amour fou, the ironically titled “Perfect Love!” (Saturday at 9:45 p.m.).

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As part of its “Cindy Sherman: Retrospective,” MOCA will present a series of films chosen by Sherman that have influenced her work as a photographer. Launching the four-film Thursday night series is Michael Powell’s “Peeping Tom,” a 1959 British picture so provocative, disturbing and original that it opened to ferocious London reviews that all but destroyed Powell’s long and notable career.

It is as understandable why “Peeping Tom” drew such a thunderingly negative initial response as it is that a director of Martin Scorsese’s stature should be such an admirer of the film. To begin with, it forces the audience to identify with a psychopathic killer just as it is making us aware of our own voyeurism, scarcely a pleasant discovery under the circumstances. Yet the film does so through such a bravura use of the camera that it is breathtaking. On the other hand, in its elegance of style and the theatricality of its acting, it is at jarring odds with the gritty realism of the angry working-class movies that were then the fashion in the English cinema.

Actually, “Peeping Tom” is not unduly violent--it is not at all an exploitation picture--and its remarkable compassion and insight save it from morbidity. Behind the credits we glimpse a camera lens, but not the person holding the camera. Then we see through the camera itself as it follows a prostitute to her quarters in Soho. Starting to undress, she becomes alarmed and starts screaming as she dies--the method of her murder, like her assailant, unseen.

We learn his identity soon enough. He’s a shy, pale young blond focus puller (Carl Boehm) at a motion picture studio who moonlights as a photographer of nude “art studies” above a corner tobacconist. He arrives at his home, a large Victorian townhouse, just as one of his tenants (Anna Massey) is celebrating her 21st birthday. She winds up taking a tour of his top-floor photo lab and screening room. Boehm runs for her one of his late father’s home movies, which takes care of considerable exposition in a stunningly deft way.

What we are shown is revolting and prophetic. Boehm’s late father, a noted scientist, used his small son as a guinea pig in an ongoing experiment in fear, every sadistic step of it recorded on film. (Ironically, this boy and his father are played by Powell and his own son!)

With awesome succinctness we see and hear--especially see--all we need to know to understand why Boehm is the way he is. As it happens, Boehm’s never-explained German accent serves only to bring to mind Peter Lorre’s not dissimilar child murderer in Fritz Lang’s “M” all the more forcefully.

Powell and his extraordinarily gifted writer, Leo Marks, have made it possible for Boehm to make this killer a truly tragic figure, and through the charming Massey we’re able to see the man he so would like to have been. Photographed with astonishing resourcefulness by the late Otto Heller and featuring an ominous piano score by Brian Easdale, “Peeping Tom” is an engrossing, virtuoso one-of-a-kind film shot through with as much dark humor as pathos. (213) 621-1767.

Note: The Nuart will present Monday through next Thursday “A Tribute to Pam Grier,” a series of her ‘70s “blaxploitation” pictures. Grier, currently starring in Quentin Tarantino’s “Jackie Brown,” will appear opening night at 7:30 p.m. preceding the screening of a new 35 mm print of “Coffy” (1973). (310) 478-6379.