The Road to Pordenone - Barrie Pattison checks out his old haunts in Paris

It's a kind of nightmare. 

Nicholas Ray

You get to Paris and the Cinémathèque is doing simultaneous tributes to Phillippe Garrel and Nick Ray.  Their forties French season isn't all that good either. Surprise is that it doesn't make all that much difference.

The Forum des Images steps in to fill the void with L'Étrange Film Festival - an extraordinary, elective event putting a Marcel Herbier, that has only had one showing since its first run in 1924, opposite Al Adamson's Satan's Sadists.

Come to Daddy

I concentrated on the new releases, each of which was a grabber. New Zealand's Ant Timpson made Come to Daddy, an Irish co-production filmed in British Columbia with Hollywood stars. Add fashion photographer Alice Waddington's Paradise Hills, the animated Aragne (Saku Sakamoto, Japan, 2018) and Chicago's Jennifer Reeder's Knives and Skins.

Across the river in the Desperado re-named Studio Écoles re-named Écoles Cinema Club, they were running Mikio Naruse and Sacha Guitry in parallel.

In all this wealth of choice the two films which I most enjoyed were the Naruse Nagareru (Flowing, Japan, 1956) with Hideko Takamine in a fifties geisha house, and the new Woody Allen, A Rainy Day in New York which is having a troubled release. These films have in common that they invite you into their makers’ unique worlds. 

Nagareru/Flowing

More on all this if I get the chance.  Writing them up adds to the pleasure of seeing them.