Really interesting to see Douglas Sirk in this mode. He would later become the undisputed god of melodrama in the 1950s, but here, a decade earlier, it feels like he's more of a hired gun. He's asked to do a lighter John Brahm movie, half detective story, half rom-com. There's touches of where Sirk would go in the future, but it's mostly buried under the genre exercises he's operating in.
The biggest thing that stands out to me that marks…
It's rare to see a movie that was so clearly discovered by the filmmaker as they were making it. Agnès Varda set out to make a movie about the scavengers and salvagers of society and went wherever her interests took her. And that interest is infectious. It's felt in every frame of the movie, most obvious when she's on screen filming her hands picking up a heart-shaped potato, but there just the same when it's just listening to someone talk about their life and their daily routines.
"Here's a graph of every director who's ever made a documentary, plotted based on their greatness, consistency, and innovation. Up near the top of the graph, you'll see names like Ken Burns, Frederick Wiseman, and Errol Morris, all of them legends in the field. All of them with the kinds of unique filmmaking styles usually reserved for narrative directors. All of them redefined what a documentary could be. For a while it felt like this kind of documentarian was a…
No one else could play the Robin Williams part. No one. You need the manic energy on the razor's edge of being fun crazy and crazy crazy, while also having one of the warmest smiles in the world, a vulnerable smile that melts your heart, but lets you know that there's a hurt man underneath. You need the crazy, on top of the gentle, on top of the pained, stacked on top of each like Jenga tower about to collapse. And no one does that quite like Williams.
